Of course, the last sentence got my full attention.

I took the emotion at the time – fierce frustration about not ‘getting the point’ – and lay on the couch for experimenting and contemplating. The outcome was fascinating, to say the least. Digging myself to the very core of the feeling I discovered frustration as just being a cunning distraction from the underlying fear and, even deeper, found the mother of all instincts: ‘I don’t want to die’, which includes ‘I as species have to perpetuate. So here I found again what you said, Richard, that ‘I’ am ‘the many’ and ‘the many’ is ‘me’.

Ignoring all the flashing stop-signs I reached to the stunningly clear perception of what ‘I’ consist of – a software survival program, causing emotion-producing chemicals and kept alive through the notion that this is me, all of me. The process of seeing the program of ‘me’, the ‘self’, in action was like lifting it from its nourishing soil, airing it, so to speak, and thus depriving it from its very life-source – even if only for a short time. That alien entity ‘me’ that I had been taking examining since so long was finally seen and experienced as something other than this physical body. These moments of apperception, of the bare awareness of ‘who I am’ now rock the boat and create all kinds of mental and physical nuisance like headache and angst, only to confirm that this experience was not just a dream.

Actually, I have found that everything is always ok at this moment right now and running the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ is a great tool for keeping me in this moment.

That’s all for now. Thanks for being there and thanks to all of you for making this list and this website available and for your willingness to help.

The question of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’ is not only ‘a great tool for keeping me in this moment’ but it is also the precise method to remove every single obstacle that prevents one from experiencing this moment as perfect.

You see, with this method you can do much more than calming yourself or be ‘in this moment’ – you can become actually and permanently free of all the worries and fears, depression and resentment, sorrow and malice, free from the Human Condition altogether. With this method you can examine and investigate what keeps you from being happy and harmless in this very moment and remove the disturbing element, ‘me’, ‘ego’ and ‘soul’, irrevocably and forever.

Of course, this enterprise is not for the ‘faint of heart and weak of knees’ as Richard usually puts it, but it is the best that I have ever done in my life. What adventure, what delight.

Why don’t you just tell us how to experience this freedom that you talk about. How to live life in freedom 24 hours a day? You keep on talking about everything but you never share how we, poor ignorant sannyasins can also live in this ‘third alternative’ realm. Isn’t it not the time that you once and for all share the ‘how’ to this thing you are always talking about?

I am glad you asked. Also you say:

A real intelligent person would not have any beliefs. He would be a ‘seeker’ and at the same time rely on his own understanding and not believe.

I agree fully with your understanding that it is very good to question all the beliefs that one has. It is the first and most important step to experience the actual world, which is here all the time, only hidden under all the concepts, emotions and beliefs we have piled on top of it. For instance, the moon was for Mr. Gurdjieff not just the piece of rock circling the earth, but the place where all souls would go after death. How could he see the moon as the big piece of rock and grey sand that it factually is?

And freedom is a ‘boots and all’ adventure, it is about turning one’s head inside out and upside down, it is re-wiring one’s brain. Slowly, slowly you come to question everything you have ever learned, and on the way you are finding out the extent of what you have been taught! So many ideas and ‘truths’ I had taken for granted, some of which have come with the mother’s milk, or school-teachers, or other ‘respectable’ authorities, and then these ideas and ‘truths’ would, with relentless investigation, turn out to be mere assumptions, beliefs, opinions and not at all facts. So you can brace yourself for many a surprise and, as I say, the safe carpet under your feet will disappear many times.

Yes, where to start! How Peter started, after he understood that Richard had something valuable to offer – he went there, for six month, every day, and sat in Richard’s lounge-room to absorb this so strange, unheard-of, and bewildering way to see and experience the world. He learned from the spoken word, but also he was reading Richard’s journal at least a dozen times. There is definitely no transmission happening, no energy-work involved. It is possible to understand the flavour of this actual world by words, and there are about a million of words available now. Alan has found Richard via search on the internet and digs himself out of the Human Condition by reading every bit of Richard’s writing and correspondence over and over again, as well as Peter’s journal and our conversations here on the mailing-list. Personal presence is not required at all – a remarkable and vital difference to the spiritual transmission of ‘Wisdom’ and the Master’s ‘Energy’.

I spent a lot of time with Peter and had some resistance at the start – being a devout sannyasin then – but was exposed to Peter’s stories and discoveries day by day. Some of the bewildering news would stick, some of it would make sense and then – the first successes became apparent from investigating into my own psyche, my own behaviour, my own emotions...

You can’t sit in our lounge room listening to stories, but you can read them. Read and read and re-read. Until something in your brain starts shifting, clicking, doubting the old, understanding the ‘actual’, and you will start seeing and sometimes experiencing what Richard means by ‘actually being here’. Whenever your head starts fuming, remember that you are tackling 20 odd years of conditioning, of looking at things from a certain background, packed with feelings, intuition and beliefs. And not only are you investigating your own behaviour and conditioning, but you are dismantling the whole of the Human Condition, which means, everything that everybody has believed up to now, Ancient Wisdom that has been passed down the ages. It is not a small thing we are doing. It is a true pioneer’s job, the adventure of a lifetime – being one of the first to discover virgin territory, an Actual Freedom from the Human Condition.

The other thing that one can do is write. We have an Actual Freedom mailing-list, as you probably know, and particularly Alan, Peter and I have written quite a few letters about our adventures in moving on the path to the actual world and leaving the ‘real’ world of malice and sorrow behind, including all the various fears, doubts, qualms and headaches that are par for the course in this adventure. You might find something interesting in the archives and may feel inclined to share about your particular questions and investigations. How to get on? Click on the ‘subscribe to mailing-list’ button on our web-site home page and you will have a reply back within a few hours.

The first thing I had to do after 17 years of spiritual conditioning was to switch my brain back on. I delighted in using my intelligence again, started doubting the old, used scrutiny and discrimination to slowly question everything that I had taken for granted wisdom. What a gullible person I had been, you could have told me any fairy-story of astrology and invisible energies, channelling and chakras, and I was ready to believe it all! Investigating and using my intelligence again, I felt like being back in High school or University, where intellect and intelligence are being trained, where it was o.k. to think, where I learned about facts – though even many of those so-called facts later turned out to be mere assumptions, disguised as scientific theories. I re-discovered the joy of discrimination, of relying on myself instead of authority, of using ‘silly’ and ‘sensible’ instead of moralistic appraisals.

And then I encountered fear – fear to leave the familiar fold – my peers, my sannyasin friends and acquaintances, the women’s club with their particular beliefs and feelings, family-sentiments, love-dreams. Most of all, I was fearful to question the authority of Osho, of God, of the divine plan behind it all, and the belief in authority as such. Suddenly I had to realize and acknowledge that I am alone, standing on my own two feet, nobody is there who knows ‘the truth’ and no all-caring and all-powerful ‘Existence’ is ‘taking care of me’. Wow, what a bummer – and then, what a freedom. I can actually do what I want, think sensibly, take care of myself without the concept of any Almighty God and enjoy life, even if everybody else chooses to be miserable for a million and one reason.

If you think that the choice where to start with un-conditioning yourself is too big, you can start with something simple like the weather. Weather is something so obviously outside of our control, and yet almost everyone I meet complains about the weather. What a delight, when it is blue sky with vivid colours, what a delight when it rains, wetting the ground, tinkering raindrops on the roof. If the weather annoys you, there is something to look at, maybe it is some emotion surfacing about something completely unrelated to the weather or some conviction being tickled that makes you wobble.

How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?

This is the core sentence and the method to all of Richard’s discoveries, the key to the actual world. With this sentence you can take apart the whole of your psyche, bit by bit, digging deeper and deeper into your unconscious. Whenever you are not happy now, there is something to look at. And every moment not happy, or not investigating into the reasons of unhappiness, is a wasted moment. There is only now, only this moment; yesterday is but a memory, tomorrow but a fantasy. If I waste this moment of being alive, because I am complaining about something, or I am worried or half-hearted, it is a wasted moment of my life. It is so wonderfully simple, so obvious – and yet, with all our conditioning, beliefs, emotions and instincts in action, it is very difficult to understand and actualize. But now, with this method, you can examine and investigate everything that keeps you from being happy now.

Richard has written a whole chapter about this vital issue of ‘This moment of being alive’. This method brings you back into this moment of being alive, there is no other moment to be experienced. If you don’t experience this moment as perfect, then this is the moment to apply change. It sounds so simple, but hardly anybody ever does it.

How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?

This is the core sentence and the method to all of Richard’s discoveries, the key to the actual world. With this sentence you can take apart the whole of your psyche, bit by bit, digging deeper and deeper into your unconscious. Whenever you are not happy now, there is something to look at. And every moment not happy, or not investigating into the reasons of unhappiness, is a wasted moment. There is only now, only this moment; yesterday is but a memory, tomorrow but a fantasy. If I waste this moment of being alive, because I am complaining about something, or I am worried or half-hearted, it is a wasted moment of my life. It is so wonderfully simple, so obvious – and yet, with all our conditioning, beliefs, emotions and instincts in action, it is very difficult to understand and actualize. But now, with this method, you can examine and investigate everything that keeps you from being happy now.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

Well, if this is not new for you, tell me, what are your discoveries when you apply this method, every day, each time you are not happy, each time you are proud, sarcastic, annoyed, bored, irritated, sad, resigned, cynical, resigned or desperate?

If that method is all too well known to you, tell me what success you had with it in your life. Are you happy and harmless, every day, whatever the circumstances? Do you live with your woman in peace, harmony and equity all day long, day-in, day-out?

And, if it is not new, and you apply it with success, why do object to what I say?

I have never come across such a radical and successful method before that can clean you up completely from any identity whatsoever. Pursuing this method sincerely and relentless one can rid oneself completely of the psychological and psychic entity inside of oneself.

I assume that’s why so many people object – it works. It has worked for me, and I am nobody special. I am an ordinary person, a down to earth, normal, flesh and blood human being, and if I can do it, anybody can do it who wants to take the challenge.

I appreciate your scrutiny.

Why?

Why scrutiny? Scrutiny has been one of the main tools to make me free. Scrutinizing every so-called fact for its factuality, every belief for its validity – which I always found lacking – and scrutinizing every emotion that went on in my head or my heart. Once I had understood that it is ‘I’ who is in the road, my ego in the head and my soul in the heart, I started to scrutinize whenever emotions happened or beliefs surfaced. Underlying both emotions and beliefs I found the instincts, in-built and innate in me and every other human being. To become free of those beliefs I had to examine them thoroughly, study how they are expressed, and how they are generally accepted in the moral system, the spiritual belief-system and amongst scientists. Everybody believes you cannot change human nature. Well, I know you can change it – you can even get rid of instincts. And it was scrutiny that brought me to that freedom.

When I describe the actual sensual experience of the world around me and when I talk about eliminating beliefs and emotions in order to be capable of such pure experiencing the actual, I am talking about the third alternative – tackling the root cause of the problem, not just transcending it. This means, eliminating the Human Condition in you, not only dis-identifying from the duality of the good and bad of the ‘normal’ world. It also means eliminating the spiritual duality of ‘being the watcher’ to a supposedly ‘illusory world’. The Third Alternative removes everything that is preventing one from experiencing the purity and perfection of the actual world, which is already happening. Only because we are wearing grey-coloured or rose-coloured glasses because of our conditioning, feelings, beliefs and instincts we are unable to see it.

I find the colours you repaint the past with to be only yours. For me they are not valid as I perceive the past with my own mind’s filter. As long as I find that you holding up a false past to compare your new third way to, I find your whole story to be contaminated with a false past.

If you were able to write from a clear space without telling me everything I have experienced in the past is a shit brown colour... then perhaps... But as it is, your notion that you have eliminated all dualities is just another falsehood ... because you keep making the same old comparisons in every paragraph you write. Your third way seems nothing more than another illusion created by a tense mind.

When I took Sannyas I had been raised and conditioned as a catholic middle-class German. In order to understand Osho I had to at least question those religious and social conditionings. But I was ready to do so, because life wasn’t all that wonderful, burdened as I was with those conditionings. I attempted to leave the ‘normal’ world of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behind and entered the ‘spiritual’ world of ‘good dharma’ and ‘bad karma’.

At that time, I could have blamed Osho for ‘telling me everything I have experienced in the past is a shit brown colour’. But my search was for freedom and I was willing to investigate what other people had told me to be the truth.

With Actual Freedom a second de-conditioning took place, a spiritual de-conditioning. And again, I was ready for it, because after all those years of sincere effort my search did not show the results I had been aiming for. This second de-conditioning was much more radical and went far deeper than the first, it is going to eliminate all of me, ego and soul, emotions and beliefs, instincts and ‘spiritual achievements’. It leaves me as this physical body with its senses, free to delight in this pure, perfect and infinite universe as a sensate and reflective flesh-and-blood human being. Nothing more, nothing less.

Actual Freedom provides a simple and effective method to achieving and is available for everybody who wishes to go for the best – presupposing that you are discontent with your life as it is now.

And then you wrote about your magic experience on the veggie farm at the Ranch: 

Then I heard a small voice in my head say to me – there is no problem, O.K., you are leaving, but since you are here for only another afternoon why don’t you just let go of this mind of yours that you know is making you so miserable, you can have it back at 5 o’clock when you leave, and you can just enjoy this crazy outing. Sounded very logical, so I agreed. Immediately, I was in bliss. Suddenly, everywhere was beauty and magic. It took me the whole time we were out in that field for me to plant just one artichoke.

You know, this is exactly what I mean, when I use the method of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Each time I ask that question, it becomes obvious that there is only this moment, and if I am not happy now, I am wasting this moment of being alive. And out of that understanding I come back here, into this moment of being alive, in its actuality, abundance, magic, perfection and purity. Or I tackle what stops me from being here, what makes me unhappy, angry, sorrowful, malicious, fearful or desperate – and sort myself out, such that I get back here. The magic is, it works each time.

Peter described it like this:

Sometimes, seeing through some part of ‘me’ as a mere belief or instinctual pattern would come as a flash of realisation, sometimes as a slow painful dawning, which I would fight tooth and nail, reluctant to even acknowledge, let alone throw out. But gradually I could notice the psychological and psychic entity becoming thinner, actually weakening its hold over me. It then became apparent to me that I was indeed fixing myself up! Peter’ s Journal, Intelligence

Most awakenings come out of pain, out of crisis. Were it not for suffering, how would we ever know anything was wrong? Like when there’s a splinter in your foot, you know from the pain that it needs to be removed. In this case, it is natural to be open to a remedy. Yet, when suffering is our life, we are less open to examine its cause. Somehow in the midst of my suicide crisis, I opened and trusted enough to doubt what I thought was true, my own thinking, my conditioned self.

Yes, that is my experience too, in the midst of the crisis, I gathered enough momentum to question everything I had believed before, and broke through to the actual world, which becomes apparent when we stop piling ideas and beliefs on what we experience. We come our senses both literally and figuratively. Very scary – and very magical. But in my experience it is not the pain that triggers the break-through, but having had enough of it and desperately wanting to find a way out of that pain. There are also people who are so much in love with their pain, they will never have an ‘awakening’, as you call it, or a break out of one’s dearly held belief structure. It needs a certain sensibility to question both the inevitability of the pain and the ‘truth’ of one’s present situation.

In order to come out of the real world one needs to investigate into the ‘hooks’ that keep pulling one back into misery, malice and fear – and investigate and eliminate them whenever they appear. That is done by running the question: ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ Then everything that is preventing you from feeling good will be examined and traced to its root.

Usually, when examining an emotion, the first thing I found was a certain concept. By questioning the validity of it and the effects that this idea had in my life, I often recognised that it fitted a general, collective belief-system. Questioning the collective belief proved a bit more scary. But it is only fear that prevented me from acknowledging the belief as belief and the facts as facts. Acknowledging the facts brought me back to here , back to my senses.

For instance, survival fear would blink red lights when I decided to quit working with my former peer-group. Examining the facts revealed that I could easily survive without the income from that particular job. But the instinctual fear blurred my view and made it great detective work to come to a sensible evaluation. I had to see the instinct in its functioning in order to not be driven by it.

On a spiritual path a sub-personality called ‘watcher’ is often created. But doesn’t one need to create a sub-personality called an ‘investigator’ to investigate all emotions, instincts and beliefs?

No, the ‘watcher’ is not a created sub-personality. The ‘watcher’ is a created identity to eventually replace the ‘normal’ identity so one can become the Divine, ‘the Whole’, ‘That’. You don’t need a sub-personality to investigate. You simply investigate. You apply ‘sensible’ and ‘silly’ instead of ‘feeling right’ or ‘feeling wrong’. It may happen in the course of investigating that you identify yourself as the investigator – as I have done for a while – but I used it, riding on the thrill of being the ‘discoverer’. But ruthlessly questioning every emotion and belief, this part of the affective identity was, in due course, also discovered and eliminated. But first things first.

Also, I would like to know how you do it in practice. My mind is so creative that it is willing to create emotions, problems, feelings, etc. forever... especially when I start looking for them, trying to sort them out and make sense out of them. It is like a self psychoanalysis. Let’s say you feel a bit anxious. You recognize it and see that you don’t feel that you perform well at work. So, you are anxious because of that. Now, you analyse why you don’t perform well at work and there are several reasons: you don’t like it so much but you need the money and like the life stability it provides; you feel somewhat depressed because of the gloomy weather, you have got a nasty common cold and you feel that everything is grey and boring.

Yes, it is like self-psychoanalysis but with the aim of eliminating the psyche, not, as traditional therapy does, ‘healing’ the psyche and shuffling the instinctual passions around a bit. I used to compare it with moving furniture on the sinking Titanic. In the process, all the emotions and beliefs of the Human Condition come in to scare you like ghosts. How dare you question your own ‘self’! But in persisting and taking one step at the time, you find that slowly, slowly you start making sense, first of one bad mood, then another and the success of a bit more freedom each time gives you the courage and strength to move on.

Taking your example gloomy weather – weather is something so obviously outside of our control, and yet almost everyone I meet complains about the weather. What a delight, when it is blue sky with vivid colours, what a delight when it rains, wetting the ground, tinkering on the roof. If the weather annoys you, there is something to look at, maybe it is some emotion surfacing about something completely unrelated to the weather or some dearly-held conviction being tickled that makes you wobble. When you stick with one issue until you found its core-belief – it might take days – you will experience that it loses its grip, that you can see the implications and ramifications. A bit more freedom from being affected by the weather is gained ... a bit more happiness.

What is the next step you do? Stay with your feelings no matter how long they last. The common cold will be gone, you will get an interesting project eventually at work and good sex at home? Do you turn on TV and enjoy a movie, read a book? Do you try to change your life (might no be good idea if in bad mood).

Well, it is up to you. I usually stuck with one issue until I gained more clarity. Some issues were too complex, I had to whittle away the surrounding emotions and beliefs first. But in the end I knew that if I don’t tackle the subject now when its happening, it will be back in due time. So why not do it now? But it is your life, your investigation, your pace. Peter and I have written in Peter’s Journal about how we tackled our issues – which are more or less similar to everybody, as they are all part of the Human Condition. (‘Intelligence’ is a good chapter for a description of his investigations). But the order and importance of the issues are most likely to be different for everyone.

Some days you might wonder why you even dared to question the ‘Tried and True’, or one could call it the ‘Tried and Failed’, what turmoil of questions you let yourself into. On other days you may be dancing because you finally found the root-cause for your unease at work. It’s all a thrilling enterprise, the adventure of a lifetime. It is such a fascinating thing to un-wire one’s own brain and to challenge the belief that ‘Human Nature cannot be changed’. It is possible. It can be changed.

Or is it that because your main project in life is self investigation, you don’t mind self investigation no matter how many black clouds are coming your way? You remember a PCE as a reference point which lets you endure? Or maybe is it like you recognize how precious this life is and enjoy the journey from nothing to nothing?

You asked what kept me going? Yes, the first and the following peak-experiences were very important. I understood from these experiences that it is ‘me’ who is in the road, all of ‘me’. And so I set out to dismantle ‘me’, made up of beliefs, emotions and instincts. I developed a fine nose for what is ‘me’ and what is simply the body and its senses, what is conditioning and what is the brain’s intelligence and apperception. And I mistrusted every ‘believing’, every ‘feeling’. I dusted my brain off, got it out of the cupboard where it had been put away as the ‘mind’ – in spiritual circles responsible for all evil – and I started to use my discriminating and inquiring capacity to discover the actual facts under the rubbish heap of ‘gut-feelings’, intuition, ‘truths’ or general accepted conviction.

Sure, it raised a great deal of fear to strike off on my own from the group that I ‘believed’ and ‘felt’ I belonged to. But with every discovered fact my confidence grew, with every dismantled belief my dependency on others diminished, morals were replaced by ‘silly’ and ‘sensible’ and I could use my own intelligence to make that choice.

Investigation and an actual freedom are my main project in life. It is the only sensible thing to do with my life. I became vitally concerned with my own happiness and eliminating malice in me. The PCE as the reference point showed me how easy and perfect it is, so why not have it 24 hours a day, every day? And since it is only this moment that I can experience the delight of being alive, it would be a waste of time not to experience the perfection of this moment. I have only this moment – it is as precious as anything. Without an after-life to look forward to or worry about, I have maybe 30 more years and then that’s it. I didn’t want to waste those 30 years in misery, doubt, depression, jealousy, hate or even a bad mood. That’s what kept me going through all the dark clouds of fear, doubt or laziness.

It is not a journey from nothing to nothing – it is a journey from misery to delight, from malice to harmlessness, from identity to not being separate, from ‘self’ to freedom.

Richard discovered that we can actually eliminate our instincts, not only transcend them. The difference is that neither body nor the intelligent part of the brain have to be discarded or transcended, but we simply clean ourselves from our software – the animal instincts and the sense of self. It is now possible to live in the world, with all the pleasures the senses can provide, but without fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

The method is to question not only what we call ego, but also our emotions, beliefs and instinctual reactions, trace them down to their roots and understand their workings. The tricky bit is that we are so used to seeing everything through the eyes and context of the self, this separate entity inside the body. That’s where the peak-experience becomes important. Since it is a completely new and radically different approach and 180 degrees opposite spiritual beliefs, I give you Richard’s definition of a peak-experience:

pure consciousness experience (PCE) –– A PCE is when one’s sense of identity temporarily vacates the throne and apperception occurs. Apperception is the mind’s perception of itself ... it is a pure awareness. Normally the mind perceives through the senses and sorts the data received according to its predilection; but the mind itself remains unperceived ... it is taken to be unknowable. Apperception is when the ‘thinker’ and the ‘feeler’ is not and an unmediated awareness occurs. The pure consciousness experience is as if one has eyes in the back of one’s head; there is a three hundred and sixty degree awareness and all is self-evidently clear. This is knowing by direct experience, unmoderated by any ‘self’ whatsoever. One is able to see that ‘I’ and ‘me’ have been standing in the way of the perfection and purity that is the essential character of this moment of being here becoming apparent. Here a solid and irrefutable native intelligence can operate freely because the ‘thinker’ and the ‘feeler’ is in abeyance. One is the universe’s experience of itself as a human being ... after all, the very stuff this body is made of is the very stuff of the universe. There is no ‘outside’ to the perfection of the universe to come from; one only thought and felt that one was a separate identity. Apperception is something that brings the facticity born out of a direct experience of the actual. Then what one is (‘what’ not ‘who’) is these sense organs in operation: this seeing is me, this hearing is me, this tasting is me, this touching is me, this smelling is me, and this thinking is me. Whereas ‘I’, the identity, am inside the body: looking out through ‘my’ eyes as if looking out through a window, listening through ‘my’ ears as if they were microphones, tasting through ‘my’ tongue, touching through ‘my’ skin, smelling through ‘my’ nose, and thinking through ‘my’ brain. Of course ‘I’ must feel isolated, alienated, alone and lonely, for ‘I’ am cut off from the magnificence of the actual world – the world as-it-is – by ‘my’ very presence. AF Glossary

Relying on the confidence of the peak-experience it is possible to start and question one’s beliefs and determine the facts, distinguish silly and sensible and and dig into one’s conditioning.

‘The spiritual practice of ‘awareness’ only shifts one’s identity to the ‘watcher’, a newly created spiritual identity. When those ‘transcended’ emotions and instincts return because the watcher wasn’t watchful enough, they are raging in full force. Instincts are not being eliminated by transcendence, not even reduced, they are only put aside through dis-identification.

No, not witness – eliminate, remove, extinguish. There is a big difference. Witnessing creates a new entity, the ‘watcher’. One is to identify with and become the ‘watcher’ and dismiss or transcend the rest as imaginary. Body-mind, emotion, thought and senses, as well as the physical world, are considered an illusion, while Consciousness is proclaimed to be one’s true nature.’

You’re saying eliminate, how do you apply that in practise? Please tell me more about your approach.

Where have you been? In many of our posts Peter and I have been talking about eliminating emotions and very often described how we did it.

I remember your last mail to Peter where you said: 

Until now your messages are not making my heart sing. Are you perhaps ‘trying’ too hard?

I don’t think that this letter will make your heart sing, because it is the ‘heart’, the ‘feeling being’, that inhibits experiencing the perfection and purity of the actual world. It is the ‘affective being’ that interprets what is actual with a wide range of emotional responses. Eliminating emotions won’t make your heart sing, it will silence it forever. No longer will you feel sad, desperate, lonely, frightened, melancholic, compassionate (i.e. suffering together), malicious, resentful, insulted, hopeful, jealous, angry, anxious or hateful.

These emotions and instinctual passions will be replaced by something else, something far superior. Pristine purity, perfection and the delight of heightened senses – a smorgasbord of tastes, a cacophony of sounds, a magic range of vivid colours and movements, an abundance of smells. Without ‘self’ you will be able to see and treat other people as your fellow human beings – benevolent and beneficent.

Now to your question: ‘How do you apply that in practise?’

First of all, you have to be a seeker and an investigator and not a believer or a follower. Then, I had to acknowledge the fact that my emotions are ‘me’ and by eliminating my emotions I am eliminating the very essence of ‘me’. So this recipe for eliminating emotions and instincts is, in fact, a recipe for the self-immolation of the psychological and psychic entity inside of you.

Peter gave a very descriptive report in his journal of how he did it:

‘Broadly, what emerged that I could relate to was that I, as a human being, had been conditioned with a set of beliefs, which formed my identity, and that by identifying, challenging and investigating these beliefs they could be discarded. Further, I had come into the world programmed with a set of instincts, and these instincts too could be similarly eliminated. The ‘I’ that I thought I was, that troublesome psychological entity, was actually nothing more than the sum total of these beliefs and the ‘me’, who I felt I was, was at core the instinctual emotions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire! And the whole package could be got rid of! Not transcended as in the spiritual world, but actually annihilated. It sounded good to me, if a touch scary.

The essential method was to undertake a total investigation into anything that was preventing me from being happy now – after all, the point of living is to be happy now, not at some time in the future, or at some time in the past. The question to ask myself was, ‘How do I experience this moment of being alive?’ Now is, after all, the only time I can experience being happy. Any emotion such as anger, frustration or boredom that is preventing my happiness now, has to be traced back to its cause – the exact incident, thought, expectation or disappointment. At the root of this emotion is inevitably found a belief or an instinct. The ruthless challenging, exposing and understanding of these beliefs and instincts actually weakens their influence on my thoughts and behaviour. The process, if followed diligently and obsessively, will ultimately cause them to disappear completely. The idea, of course, being to eliminate the cause of my unhappiness, so that I can experience life at the optimum, now.

It soon presents success incrementally, as freedom from these beliefs and instincts is indeed an actual freedom that results in increased peace and harmony for myself and in my relating with those around me. The method does bring up fear and resistance, because one is dismantling one’s very ‘self’, those very beliefs one holds so dearly.

It sounds so simple, but most people who had talked to Richard were not even willing to take a small step along the way. Most people would seemingly like their life to be better, but faced with the prospect of actually having to do something themselves, or having to change the way they are, soon sneak away, only to re-run the ‘tried and failed’ methods. Of course, the major fear is that it will work and the ‘self’ will go! For me, I just figured that I had ‘nothing left to lose’, it was either a slow, miserable, painful, death-like life or a quick death of what I saw as the problem – the ‘self’ or psychological entity and psychic entity within.’ Peter’s Journal, ‘Introduction’

The core sentence and the key method to eliminating emotions is to ask oneself ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ With this sentence you can take apart the whole of your psyche, bit by bit, digging deeper and deeper into your unconscious. Whenever you are not happy now, there is something to look at. And every moment not being happy, or not investigating into the reasons of unhappiness, is a wasted moment. There is only now, there is only this moment, yesterday is but a memory, tomorrow but a fantasy. If I waste this moment of being alive, because I am complaining about something, or because I am worried or half-hearted, it is a wasted moment of my life. This method is so wonderfully simple, so obvious when you start applying it – and yet, with all our conditioning, beliefs, instinctual passions and emotions in action, it is very difficult to comprehend and actualize. But applying this method diligently and persistently, you can examine and investigate everything that keeps you from being happy now. If you are interested, there is a detailed description on this URL: http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/thismomentofbeingalive.htm

Richard gives a wonderful description of the time when the seeking stops and one arrives at one’s destiny:

The day finally dawns when something irrevocable happens inside the brain. In an ecstatic moment of being present, ‘I’ expire. ‘I’ am extirpated, rubbed out. ‘I’ cease to exist, permanently. There is a sensation inside the top of the brain-stem that is experienced as a physical ‘turning over’ of some kind ... something that can never, ever, turn back. Something irrevocable happens and everything is different, somehow, although everything stays the same physically ... with the outstanding exception of a perfection and purity permeating all and everything. Something has changed, although it is as if nothing has happened ... except that the entire world is transformed into a magical fairy-tale-like playground full of incredible joy and delight that is never-ending. ‘My’ demise was as fictitious as ‘my’ apparent presence. I have always been here, I realize, that ‘I’ only imagined that ‘I’ existed. It was all an emotional play in a fertile imagination ... which was, however, fuelled by an actual hormonal substance triggered off from within the brain-stem. Richard’s Journal, Article 18

Does, what you call ‘elimination’, happen without effort, or is it something that has to be ‘done’?

While I am taking a particular emotion or belief apart, digging deeper and deeper into its root cause, something is ‘done’, effort is applied. I am using my brain, contemplating, investigating, searching, daring, asking, questioning, doubting, until I get to the bottom of that particular issue. It is part of ‘me’, an alien, but fiercely defended, entity inside my body, for ‘I’ am nothing but my feelings, emotions, beliefs and instinctual passions. Hence ‘I’ will do everything to obstruct this questioning, this investigating and this eliminating, for ‘I’ am terribly afraid to die.

To investigate in spite of that fear requires courage, effort and a burning intent. Only after I have dug deeply into that issue, exposed it to the light of awareness and understanding, it will disappear ‘without effort’, never to rear its ugly head again.

At the same time, removing the filtering veils of beliefs and fears, my senses become heightened, I am more here and less in fear, love, hope, churning emotions or in remote fairy-worlds. I am on this planet, on the chair, the rain pouring on the leaves sounds deliciously in my ears, the fridge is humming, my toes curling in delight. Life is eminently easy and wonder-ful, magically abundant and carefree. Once all discoveries are made, all beliefs dismantled, all instincts laid bare, they go up in smoke and ‘I’ will die the illusory death that ends the existence of the ‘self’. To investigate into the survival instincts of the ‘self’ is effort, living in this actual world is utterly effortless, an ongoing delight.

How did you find Richard’s Journal? Have you given up after the first chapter because it is so dense and choc-a-block full with unknown words?

I am enjoying reading his journal and I am still at it, as I am reading different books at the same time.

Just a suggestion – because Actual Freedom lies 180 degrees opposite to all spiritual beliefs, as you might have understood from your meeting with Richard – it is definitely less confusing to read Richard’s Journal by itself, without mixing it with other writings. Words might look similar – and being spiritually conditioned one easily translates Richard’s words into meaning something spiritual. After all, the spiritual world is all one knows – with the rare exceptions of a pure consciousness experience. To interpret the actual into something ethereal, supernatural or spiritual would be missing the point completely.

Personally I had to read the journal, particularly certain paragraphs and passages, many times over until I got my first glimpses of the non-spiritual actual and down-to-earth nature of what Richard is saying. Further I had long discussions with Peter about it, doing a reality check by comparing my understanding and opinion with his. Now it all looks obvious and transparent, but back in my spiritual days, some of Richard’s words fitted my beliefs, convictions, feelings and intuition, and some just didn’t make sense until I questioned all of my own beliefs, one after the other...

The story of what happened when I popped through the thick clouds of beliefs and saw the actual world for the first time, you will find in Vineeto’s Bit of Peter’s Journal (pg193ff).

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