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Selected Correspondence Vineeto Pure Consciousness Experience I have experienced many mini-PCEs and very slightly a PCE … Given that a PCE is the lodestone for an actualist by which to determine the difference between the actual world and the normal experience of ‘self’, I found it essential to be particularly careful not to blur the distinction between feeling excellent or feeling exceptionally happy and having a ‘self’-less experience. In a PCE a new magic dimension opens that was hidden by the presence of ‘me’ and the actual world is experienced in its brilliance and wonder. In distinction, when I am simply feeling excellent or feeling exceptionally happy, I can detect upon close attention either a grey or rosy veil that lies between ‘me’ and the crisp radiance and sparkle of the actual world. Only a ‘self’-less PCE is the genuine article, and it is so outstanding, so
perfect, so obviously the way I want to live for the rest of my life. A while ago we had some discussions on this list about
differentiating one’s experiences. You can find them in the library under Thank you for clearing up the confusion I had about PCEs and feeling excellent; there definitely was a ‘Self’ in the experiences I went through, but they were sooo good ... now I am having trouble trying to experience it again. There are plenty of
… and another from his correspondence –
Personally, what eventuated my first major pure consciousness experience was that I wanted to know, without any smidgen of a doubt, the difference between belief and actuality. I wanted to know by experience that which exists outside of my own head and heart, or other people’s heads and hearts, that which actually exists as opposed to that which is merely a man-made or woman-made belief, feeling, opinion, theory or concept. This single-pointed passion for what I then called ‘discovering the truth’ caused the veil of my beliefs to rip and lead me to discover the actual world – unspoiled by human-made feelings or beliefs, devoid of malice and sorrow, pure, benign, blithe and ever-now. There is something else I would like to ask, when Richard says,
couldn’t he do this with you and Peter, when anyone one of you is experiencing a PCE? Or maybe you and Peter also when and if you have a PCE at the same time? Actual Freedom and PCEs are the same in quality, aren’t they? The only difference is one is permanent and the other temporary, would this be right? A PCE is significantly different from an actual freedom from the human condition because a PCE can only ever be a temporary experience whereas an actual freedom is permanently ongoing and irreversible. I have many times experienced the actual world in a pure consciousness experience but once the ‘self’ returns as the PCE fades away, the purity and benignity of the actual world also fades and becomes but a memory. A PCE is something special for me because I know it can disappear any moment – it is only a holiday from ‘self’. Whereas Richard, being permanently devoid of the burden of being a ‘self’, is this infinite and perfect physical universe experiencing itself as a sensate, reflective human being. For a more detailed description of life in actual freedom you can browse through
I explored this particular ‘hook’ on which my identity hung at first tentatively, then more boldly, knowing well that at any time I could discover the core of it and be lost. As part of this investigation I chatted to Peter about my explorations and a few days later to Richard, just to make sure that I would not succumb to the temptation of ‘forgetting’ a topic so close to the bone. My persistent inquiry triggered a pure consciousness experience and with astounding clarity I experienced myself as completely separate from Peter, two flesh-and-blood human beings not at all affectively or psychically connected in any way. It was utterly amazing and magical that two complete strangers – as in not psychically connected – get to interact with each other in utter intimacy. In such intimacy there is no ‘me’ trying to pull the strings, no ‘me’ thinking or feeling about ‘me’ in relationship to the other, and a fresh, unmediated and direct experiencing happens on its own accord. It is most striking when determined and ‘persistent inquiry’ of this sort triggers a PCE. Each time this happens, I see with renewed clarity how the affective and psychic entity prevents and precludes the experiencing of the purity and pristineness of the actual world. Yes, at such times it is often like going deep into a dark tunnel of unexplored passions and then suddenly coming out the other end where everything has always been perfect and benign. It is my ongoing conundrum how not only to weaken but to permanently switch off the magnetic force that inevitably sucks be back into being ‘me’ after a PCE. * This PCE confirmed that my holding onto a cozy relationship was nevertheless my identity in action. Although my relationship with Peter is founded on felicitous feelings only and I live with him in perfect peace and harmony, I clearly could see that ‘I’ as an identity was preventing something far, far superior to any psychic or psychological connection – an exquisitely delightful direct intimacy with a fellow human being. A couple of days later, when I checked what was left of ‘my’ relationship to Peter, I realized that not only had I lost any sense of my former affective connectedness but also my feelings of competition and comparison had disappeared. I had always regarded Peter as the better and older actualist and the better and more accurate writer and now I found such emotionally-charged comparisons had completely vanished. I also discovered that this entailed that I no longer feel obliged to respectfully wait until he becomes free before I dare the final jump. Now that I don’t relegate myself to a slot in an imaginary queue, nobody can prevent me from becoming free from the human condition. Seeing my identity in action in a similar way to you can fuel my intent, can it not? If I see clearly what is getting in the way of living in peace and harmony, in other words the ‘downside’ to affective feelings, then would that not tend to spur my intent to be free from those very things that get in the way? The comparison between a pure consciousness experience and my every day living experience certainly spurs me on. Seeing and understanding, over and over, the ‘‘downside’ to affective feelings’, as you say, does indeed weaken the magnetism of being ‘me’. However, I think that you need to have the firm intent to live in genuine peace, whatever the price, in order to be motivated to question and explore your identity and find out ‘what is getting in the way of living in peace and harmony’ . Then the potent combination of sincerity, naiveté and wonder will tip the balance towards making ‘the already always existing peace-on-earth become apparent’, as Richard said to No 37. Seeing similarities between your social/instinctual identity and others certainly gives you confidence as to the accuracy and veracity of your investigations, but what spurred me on was success in becoming more happy and, even more importantly, more harmless. Experiencing that the actualism process demonstrably works over a substantial period of time and in all down-to-earth conditions then incrementally turns confidence into surety. Does the intent lead to a PCE or do you think something else is happening? There are the spontaneous PCEs that everyone experiences at some point in their lives, which I explain as a spontaneous temporary glitch in the instinctual programming that allows the perception to be purely sensate and thinking to be free from any affective influences. These PCEs seem to be more frequent in childhood when the identity is not yet set in concrete, so to speak. However, when a person has a good dose of sincerity, sufficient enough to re-awaken his or her naiveté, then he or she may develop an intent to live the purity, peace and wonder they have experienced in such rare moments of ‘self’-lessness as often as possible – i.e. it takes naiveté to devote one’s life to becoming happy and harmless. Only then, the memory of a spontaneously occurring PCE spurs me on to demolish the elaborate and firmly consolidated edifice of my ‘self’ in order to facilitate pure consciousness experiences happening again and again. You could compare it to living in a securely air-tightened bunker when suddenly a crack appears in the wall and brings in some pure sweet fresh air … and suddenly the whole bunker disappears along with ‘me’. The bunker eventually reassembles itself and the crack is automatically repaired – a process due to the ‘self’-sustaining nature of the social-instinctual programming. It is then up to ‘me’, the one who thinks and feels to be in that bunker, to either wait for another accidental crack – akin to waiting for Godot – or to actively do something so as to experience the magical actual world again. In other words, when the PCE fades, ‘I’ then have to get on with the moment-to-moment business at hand – to demolish the very structure that is ‘me’. A weakened and less ‘self’-centred structure of ‘me’ certainly provides more opportunities for ‘cracks’, i.e. PCEs, but all of ‘me’ needs to be extinguished in order that those ‘cracks’ don’t automatically ‘self’-repair and yet again shut out the splendour and purity of the actual world.
It is my ongoing conundrum how not only to weaken but to permanently switch off the magnetic force that inevitably sucks me back into being ‘me’ after a PCE. I was curious about your use of the word ‘conundrum’, but I see that it is indeed a puzzle of the highest sort. Peter advised me to pay particular attention to what happens during a PCE to cause it to diminish and fade. This has been most difficult to do, but it can be done. It is an ongoing ‘work in progress’. Is this the piece of Peter’s posts that you are referring to?
Peter suggested investigating what causes a period of feeling excellent to fade, not what causes a PCE to fade. A PCE by its very nature is a temporary experience, i.e. such experiences inevitably fade, they don’t need a cause to fade. As such, I can never determine what exactly causes a PCE to fade; I simply experience this fading as the unavoidable effect of being a ‘self’ – the ‘magnetic force’ of ‘me’. It is one thing to experience ‘self’-lessness for a temporary period of time as in a PCE, it is quite another to permanently abdicate the throne. The act of ‘self’-immolation is not the act of prolonging a PCE indefinitely – they are two distinctly separate experiences. A PCE is a temporary-only experience of the actual world whereas ‘self’-immolation is a once-only event that brings an irrevocable end to my very ‘being’. * I am also interested in what happens when investigation of particular affective feeling leads to the disappearance of that feeling and what causes it to come back. In my experience, it seems that certain issues come up again and again at times. I keep thinking that because they come back, I must have missed something in my investigation into them. Despite the fact that I had experienced in a PCE a completely non-spiritual material-only universe that was utterly majestic and magnificent, I still had to whittle away at a lot of aspects of my belief in something other than this physical actual world. In fact, I am still at it because ‘I’ am, by my very nature, non-physical, non-actual and therefore spiritual. In the beginning I also often thought that I had missed something when a feeling or an issue returned but the longer I study the human condition in me, and the more I observe other people, the more I come to understand the perversity and the deeply ingrained structure of ‘me’, the psychological/psychic being that is a direct product of this ancient animal survival program. An estimated one million years of human history – dependent upon somewhat whimsical speculations as to the transition from animal-only to animal-human is an enormous heritage to unravel. In the light of the extent and density of this programming, when a bit of the million-year old social programming or the billions-of-years old animal instinctual programming resurfaces, I came to understand that I haven’t necessarily missed something, I simply can’t understand it all or take it all in, at once. You could also say that one inevitably misses something the first time round in an investigation because particular issues have many aspects and many layers that are not all apparent at the first examination. Your thoughts on this are most helpful. It is a hard thing for me to pinpoint what happens to cause a PCE to dimmer and fade, but essentially it always involves some ‘self’-centred, egocentric experience to take the fore, whether by dint of fear, apprehensiveness, and often (I think) a deep and abiding terror of extinction. Once ‘I’ realize that I am no longer needed, ‘I’ dig my heels in ever deeper and cling passionately to my ‘job’ which is to survive. There are indeed many layers to this thing, and as usual I think I may have berated myself for ‘missing’ something, when the many layers and the density of this programming is to a large extent unconscious and hidden from view. Many of my discoveries while practising Actualism have been serendipitous ... a bit like spontaneous happenings, and sudden realizations in unguarded moments about the nature of ‘me’ and how ‘I’ stand in the way of perfection. This is not to say that there has not been hard effort and diligent persistence involved – a bit like wresting civilization from the wilderness, a deliberate hacking away and toiling to clear the ground. It seems to work in tandem. I can very well relate to what you describe as ‘a deep and abiding terror of extinction’. The trick that often helps me turn this terror into excitement is to remember that ‘I’ have a voluntary mission which is far more dignifying that ‘my’ survival – ‘I’ am to bring about peace-on-earth by vacating the throne, permanently. And although sometimes I feel as though I am only inching my way closer to ‘my’ destiny, I do recognize that I am making progress. I only need to look back at how I used to experience life a few years back to know this is a fact. And yes, unexpected insights and PCEs and deliberate exploration of ‘me’ do indeed ‘work in tandem.’ The serendipitous events happen when I again and again discover the already existing peace on earth in this wondrous and magnificent and not-passive universe. As the master wordsmith describes –
There are momentary glimpses, as you say, as glancing through a crack. Is this what it was like when we were children? I remember being completely unbound from time and space, totally absorbed in what was happening in front of me right then and there. Children are not born innocent as we have been made to believe by Eastern religions – they are little instinctually-driven beings that are in the process of being trained to curb their passions in a socially accepted way, the process known as instilling a social conscience. Young children follow their feelings more freely than adults because their socialisation process of shoulds and shouldn’ts is not yet complete and they might feel ‘unbound from time and space’ because their feelings are not yet burdened by the responsibilities of adulthood or the fear of death. Sometimes, however, children do glance into the actual world by accident – as do adults on occasion – and experience a pure consciousness experience. Clearly children are not wonderful innocent little beings. Far from it. However, as you say, at times they are directly connected to the actual. I remember having an experience occasionally before going to sleep where (and this is where words fail) I seemed to ‘expand’ to fill the universe, or maybe the gap between my skin and everything else disappeared. It was a calm clear place that would happen fairly frequently, but decreased in frequency over the years until my early teens or so, when I was awash in other more pressing matters. In a pure consciousness experience the distance or separation between ‘me’ and ‘my’ senses – and thus the external world – temporarily disappears, because this separation is created by ‘me’, a psychological and psychic non-physical entity trapped inside the body. In actuality, there is no separation whatsoever between this physical body and anything or anyone else. Everything and everyone is the very self-same stuff that this physical world is and that this physical body is. Because there is no separation in the actual world, a pure consciousness experience is exemplified by utter purity and stillness in absence of the continuous noise that emanates from the emotions and passions of the alien ‘self’. This experience is, however, not to be confused with the spiritual experience of Oneness, epitomized in the phrase: ‘I am everything and Everything is Me’. The feeling of Oneness creates an erroneous impression that separation is ended ... but the ‘self’ is nevertheless present. An altered state of consciousness often occurs as a result of intense feelings of loneliness, alienation and despair, a ‘dark night of the soul’ and then, as one seemingly makes a last instinctual grasp for survival, one is filled with grand thoughts and sublime feelings. To this day, I’ve missed that experience, assuming it was a childhood thing, never to recur, but maybe not... If you keep poking into your beliefs and feelings with sincerity and pure intent you are bound to find the crack in the door, the glitch in the ‘synaptic self’, as LeDoux calls it in his latest book, a glitch that eventuates a slipping out from control into a ‘self’-less experience. My first PCE occurred some months after beginning to practice actualism and it was this experience that finally confirmed Richard’s description of a state beyond Enlightenment to be factual. I then knew that this is what I wanted for the rest of my life. PS: Richard had some
I started thinking that if Richard was the only one free of ego, how could any of us ascertain the terrain accurately. Even if 0.000001 ego remained, wasn’t missing by an inch missing by a mile? Hmmm. Now I hope this is all clear because I was going over this with innocence, earnest but not with deadly seriousness. In a pure consciousness experience you know without doubt that you are, albeit temporarily, utterly free from both your ego and your soul. As long as there is a doubt that ‘I’ might be about, it is not a pure consciousness experience. But once you have had a PCE you can ‘ascertain the terrain accurately’ because you then know by your own experience the difference between normal experiencing, spiritual delusion and the perfection and purity of the actual world. I surmised the PCEs that I described were in effect PCEs as nobody made any commentary to the contrary. Nobody but you can be the arbiter of your experiences and that includes pure
consciousness experiences. Only you can determine if your experience was non-affective and ‘self’-less or an experience of
feeling excellent with heightened awareness or a delusionary altered state of consciousness. There are I thought of the days when we use to say I’m trying to find my self. How would you know you were lost? How would you know you were found, since you didn’t have a self in the first place? This body knows when it is free from the inhibiting and pernicious self – it is such an exuberant experience of liberation when the ‘self’ temporarily disappears – one’s senses are perceiving with unprecedented intensity and the brain is functioning with exceptional clarity. However, once the ‘self’ returns, the first thing that often happens is an attempt to dismiss, belittle and question the experience of purity and perfection in order for the ‘self’ to regain control. With practice you become experienced enough in your ‘self’-awareness to recognize these doubts as the very survival mechanism of the ‘self’. I started contemplating what is the criteria that one would know if they were no more? How does one recognize non-identity? Or the innocence of apperceptive awareness and will, as opposed to some subtle form of soul or egoic identity. I couldn’t wait to get to my office to write this e-mail. It was about 5:00 AM when I was at this. Still I questioned who would be ascertaining and determining that looking under every psychic nook and cranny was not some form of thinking/feeling identity? Well I kept asking the question, and was real excited about getting it over to you folks hoping Richard and the senior folks would comment. The ‘self’ is like a viral disease. This body knows when it is free of disease – it doesn’t need a confirmation from the ‘virus’ to know that there is no virus. My train ride is about an hour. I stayed with this topic and noticed less separation between existence and the question (What am I experiencing). Things became subtler and subtler. I noticed that actuality is very fast. Actuality is warp drive and I had to slow down considerably to consolidate having an ‘I’. My experience is that in a state of heightened awareness unhampered by my identity my senses are able to perceive my surroundings with more far detail and more depth. Un-interfered by my emotions I can think about the human condition or about some practical problem clearer and sharper. It is not that ‘actuality is very fast’ but that my sensual perception is not slowed down by fear and other ‘self’-centred survival instincts. And as you described, ‘I’ put the breaks on to stay in existence, and that is usually experienced as caution, fear or mental confusion. In my initial criticisms of Richard based on my own ignorance, I had made reference to what I thought was some form of detached self in Richard, especially when he would use adjectives describing the topography according to the only maps that I knew. Is there a clear demarcation point, that those of us with egos extant can be sure we are coming from apperceptive awareness, PCE as opposed to some form of self? For me the demarcation line between my nowadays normal state of feeling excellent and a pure consciousness experience is that in a PCE everything has an additional magical quality. There is a marked silence in my head as the identity suddenly stops generating subtle feelings and any emotional ‘connectedness’ to or wariness of people, things and events ceases. In a PCE, I am aware of an additional depth in my perception in that trees for instance are not only their shape, colour, movement and form but also their history, so to speak – they were a seedling, they have grown, they might be furniture or fertilizer one day. The same goes for computers, furniture, buildings or food – in this heightened awareness of a PCE one experiences that nothing is merely passive, everything changes, moves, grows or dies, is manufactured or is falling apart. The other very obvious difference is that in a PCE I have no feeling of separation at all – it is not that I feel ‘one’ with everything as in a spiritual experience but that the very feeling of separateness has disappeared together with the identity who feels separate. It is then obvious that I am as much the universe as people and things around me with the added bonus that I am capable of being exquisitely aware of all its wonder and magnificence. That’s what I didn’t understand about Richards comments about ‘perfection, coolness of the breeze etc. I thought those were examples of what Richard was talking about a ‘detached self’. A ‘self’ cannot imagine that a ‘self’-less – or ‘Self’-less – existence is possible. But the more you collect information from your pure consciousness experiences, the less convincing will be the ‘self’s’ claims that everyone needs a ‘self’ to survive and to sensately experience the actual world we humans live in.
RESPONDENT: What follows is a ramble. Would be delighted if you respond, of course. Emotion backed thoughts. Feelings. Emotions. Instincts. Instinctual passions. Thoughts. Beliefs. Thinker and Feeler and Social Identity and Instinctual Self. Apperception. Are all these things demonstrably distinct? VINEETO: Given that The more you become aware of your feelings as they are occurring and your underlying identity, the weaker your identity becomes, which in turn frees your awareness for sensuous perception that was previously stifled. At some point there is so much awareness freed of its normal ‘self’-centredness that you are able to be both aware of everything that is happening and of this awareness in operation as well – and to be aware of being aware is apperception and apperception is what happens in a pure consciousness experience. A PCE occurs when, for whatever reason, a ‘self’-less awareness is operating and
awareness that is freed of the burden of ‘me’ becomes aware of itself. This is sometimes actuated either through a physically
dangerous event like an accident, through a sudden shock, through drug use or an unusual relaxing experience like a nature
experience. The actualism method – continuous and extensive attention, observation and questioning of ‘who’ you feel and
think you are – is designed to increase awareness and facilitate apperception not only as a one-off event but as a more and more
inevitable outcome of increased attentiveness.
RESPONDENT: It is a very brief description of the ‘social identity’ and it happened to me to be removed in a short period of time. VINEETO: What you have described in your first letter was not only a removal of
your social identity but from your description it was evident that this temporary vacuum was immediately filled with emotion –
it became an affective experience of ‘godliness’, also known as an Altered State of Consciousness. In such an ASC one feels
that one knows the Truth, one feels oneself to be all-knowing, all-powerful, one-with-everything, filled with Love for all,
compassionate to every living being and above and beyond all normal human experience. I once had such a powerful ASC that lasted
for two days, and having learnt from Richard about its pitfalls, I used the experience to investigate exactly how my intelligence
and my sensibility was devastatingly effected by these aggrandizing emotions. I was relieved when the experience was finally over
and I was able to again think clearly and reasonably without being driven by feelings of grandeur and delusion. You can find You have described the experience ‘to be removed’ from your social identity in an earlier post –
In contrast to such altered states of consciousness, a pure consciousness experience is a non-affective ‘self’-less pure sensate experience where all of ‘me’, both ego and soul, both my social identity and my instinctual being are temporarily in abeyance. In a PCE there is no identity present to feel like a God living in an ethereal other-worldly realm. God, although everyone on the planet believes in him (or her) in some way or other, is nothing but a passionate imagination that only exists in people’s heads and hearts. In a pure consciousness experience one is one’s sense organs brimming with delight, wallowing in the enormous abundance of sensual experience that is perpetually here while one is at the same time fully aware of being an aware sensate and reflective human being. This bare awareness of being aware, apperception, is the fundamental key to a pure consciousness experience – both coincide with each other. With an investigative awareness running – how am I experiencing this moment of being alive? – one is able to examines one’s affective feelings, emotions and instinctual passions as they occur. The longer one practices such investigative awareness, the less one’s feelings, emotions and passions interfere with one’s sensuous attentiveness of being alive at this very moment – an awareness that simply registers sensate experiencing. This sensate awareness is not something one can practice or cultivate in isolation from removing the affective feelings that interfere with the simple delight of being alive. Given sufficient practice of the actualism method, an ongoing idle sensate attentiveness to being alive can momentarily turn into an awareness of being aware, which is apperception, and a pure consciousness experience takes place. And then you are hooked.
A while back there was the thread on humour. I puzzled then and since. Richard, as the only person living in actual freedom, expressed a fondness for darker humour. How does a sense of humour fit into a fully apperceptive universe? It seems to me that a sense of humour is a program itself, with the brain responding to a certain external stimulus, resulting in a predictable response. That sounds like a program to me. Maybe I’m missing the point... if one of the stated goals is to eliminate all the programs, how does one rationalize this apparent humour program? And if humour is a running program, then actualist are not eliminating the programs, and merely selecting the programs they prefer. Yes, here you are ‘missing the point’. The stated goal for me is to become free from malice and sorrow, not to ‘eliminate all the programs’. Although the ‘self’ consists of a social programming and an instinctual survival program, the process of becoming free from my ‘self’ does not equal (¹) questioning all programs per se. Actualism, the process of becoming free from my ‘self’, it is the practice of observing and investigating ‘me’ in action, and the way to do this is to examine my beliefs, feelings and emotions when and as they occur. In this process humour only enters as an issue of investigation if it contains malice or sorrow. As is evident in a PCE, the sense of the humour intrinsic to many of life’s situations and events is not eradicated but is magically bereft of any trace of malevolence, pathos or pity. An actual freedom is squeaky clean but far from humourless. I suspect this is the case, and it’s fine, because the implication is that the human is merely a collection of programs, then we make our choices and attempt to make the best ones. There is only one program I am concerned about and that is the human condition consisting of the social-spiritual programming and the animal-instinctual survival program of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. I could venture even further out on a limb and suggest that a PCE is in fact a program itself, but that sounds like a topic for another day). The PCE is marked by the absence of ‘me’, the social-instinctual program, in other words, the absence of my ‘self’, the psychological and psychic identity that has taken residence within this flesh-and-blood body. The temporary absence of ‘me’ provides the opportunity to see the workings of my social-instinctual program from the outside, so to speak. When ‘I’ am not present, the actual world, which is already always here, becomes apparent. You can compare the human condition with wearing gloomy or rosy filters in front of you eyes and actualism as a method to successively remove those filters. According to your supposition a PCE – when those filters are temporarily totally removed and one sees clearly – would be a new ‘seeing program’ as if one only exchanges filters. However, in a PCE you know without doubt that the ‘filter’ is completely removed – in a PCE there is no ‘me’ to be found anywhere. At this point it might be appropriate to mention that the actualist writings can only give you information so as to establish a working hypothesis for yourself. This hypothesis can only be confirmed experientially. Only when you have – or remember having had – a pure consciousness experience, will you know for sure by your own experience that a PCE is not another program or ‘filter’ but that it is an experience of pure sensual perception and clear thinking, completely unrestricted by any psychologic or psychic program whatsoever. As Richard phrased it in his recent post to No 34 –
In a PCE you experience, without doubt, for yourself, that there is indeed an actual world already here, all the time, and that this actuality exists regardless of whether human beings object to it or rile against it, what they feel about it, how they imagine it to be otherwise or how they want to change it to suit their whims.
It’s also clear that this state has been created by my identity, an entity that has an increasingly alien character. From my experience, it does not matter if ‘me’ as an identity – who I think and feel I am – has an alien character or a non-alien character – all of it is ‘me’, no matter into how many parts I preferred to split myself. In my days of therapy and spiritual practice I used to divide my ‘self’ into an ‘inner male’ and an ‘outer female’, the feeler and the watcher, the intuitive and the rational self, the lower ‘self’ and the higher ‘self’, the passionate old ‘me’ and the aware new ‘me’. Part of the job of backtracking out of the spiritual-psychological nonsense I had been conditioned with was to stop dividing me into various identities and recognize, acknowledge and affectively experience that ‘who I am’ is an instinctually driven, culturally tainted and spiritually conditioned identity. This shocking and unflattering acknowledgement prepared the ground for an actual change. Without going into the gory details, recently I’ve had another example of how insidious and entrenched the identity is, and how determined it is to protect its existence, at all costs. In this instance, the identity demanded the usual set of emotions (guilt, shame, etc.), and while I certainly felt them, I didn’t react in the typical fashion by cooperating and going on an affective tangential loop-de-doo. It was really quite amazing to observe this marvellously complex process at play, sort of like those documentaries on life on the deep ocean floor. I have spent a lot of time over the last 10 years digging into the various aspects of social conditioning (religion, socio-culture, gender, parents/authorities), a process accelerated over the last year by applying the AF method, and am relatively free of these overt influences. Now it’s time to take the elevator down to the next floor. Thanks all Your recent correspondences with Richard and me set me off thinking about the first few months when I started exploring actualism, and what it was that preceded and initiated my first major PCE. With the benefit of hindsight it was clear that my way of taking ‘the elevator down to the next floor’ was to decide to close the back door on a lot of aspects of my former life. Meditation and being the ‘watcher’ did not work because it did not make me happy, let alone make me harmless. Being a follower of Rajneesh and belonging to the Sannyas community did not work because it did not peace or happiness. There was still no peace in the world, neither within the Sannyasin community nor in any other spiritual or religious belief-system. So, although I did not quite know where I was going when I closed the back door, I nevertheless knew by experience where I would not find the solution – neither in the real world nor in the spiritual world. In closing the door on my past life, I abandoned my dreams and entered new territory with no option to turn back. I am convinced that it was this common sense commitment to say ‘no’ to the well-tried, and always-failed, methods and my daring to say ‘never again’ to holding on to my past hopes, dreams and beliefs that inevitably catapulted me into a PCE – the experience of being right here, right now, bare of any belief, truth, hope or preconceived idea. This pure consciousness experience radically changed my understanding of actualism because for the first time I understood, in my own experience, what Richard was talking about and what he is living 24 hours a day … and it’s paradise on earth.
What got my main attention out of all the writings that went back and forth is the one you have sent to Richard the other day: ‘And then it happened. I had the attack I formerly had at the moment of falling asleep. But now I was wide awake! A tremendous pressure wave penetrated from below my spine into my skull. It was exactly at the moment whereby I understood ... ... It was absolutely nothing!’ And also: ‘But now, for the first time there was a new kind of certainty. An absolute certainty based on absolutely nothing. I do not assert that this is always so, but at the moment the process started this WAS so. Therefore there was NO doubt. Not because I had found all the answers, but because there was no ‘I’ present any more that needed answers to end its own insecurities’ ... ‘The ending of all suffering, but also the ending of that what can make emotions a delight to have. (Beauty, love, understanding, etc.)’ ... ‘Well, I am absolutely sure of one thing. The process does not have ANY emotion in it whatsoever. No fear, as you suggested. No happiness. None.’ I have until now only this much description of what you call ‘your process’ and I
am fascinated by it because it reminds me strongly of the first peak experiences I had after I met Peter and Richard. For the
description of it I will attach what I have written in But the shock from the contrast was immense, it left me shaking for days. I, for myself, can definitely say that it was fear that coloured the interpretation and memory of this experience. What helped me since then to go back and be familiar in this pure, pristine, actual state was being able to communicate with Peter in this actuality, and the delight of meeting another human being so intimately as never before. It helped me to notice that even without beliefs I can still rely on my senses – seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, thinking, talking, reflecting. With growing confidence I now can enjoy the heightened intensity of the senses, be safe in being with other human beings without the protective shell of ideas, beliefs, emotions and instincts. And it is now my experience that it is absolutely possible and imminently desirable to live in that state 24 hrs. a day. I am not lacking anything I would need to survive, my brain functions more sensibly and better than ever to supply whatever I need to take care of myself. I am writing this, I notice, to seduce you to experiment with what you call ‘your process’ into that direction, using all the senses and meeting another ‘human being’ as a delightful addition to being on your own, because I found it the best way to be alive since sliced bread. By communication this process for me has become practicably applicable, testable and magically down-to-earth. Becoming grounded into my senses as the media to experience the world rather than relying on my imagination and fear has helped me immensely to dwell in this ‘state’ for longer and longer periods, interacting with people with an ease I thought I could never have. And you say it yourself that there was ‘An absolute certainty based on absolutely nothing ... NO doubt.’ I call it obvious and evident.
And I found another line of Richard’s writing – a benefit of my extensive playing with the web-site:
There it was again – ‘altruistically self-immolated’ – and this time I could see the word from another angle. It has nothing to do with being altruistic for other people – whether they get something directly out of my becoming free or not. It has to do with being unselfish as in my ‘self’ getting out of the way, so that the perfection can become apparent. ‘I’ won’t even get a medal for my altruistic behaviour – ‘I’ will simply not exist anymore. And thus my hang-up with the Christian – and spiritual – morality of being selfish or un-selfish has finally been resolved. Now I can see the sparkling morning, the dewdrops glittering thousand fold on the thin tea-tree leaves, moving and shining like river stones, the birds chirping their birds-sounds and the air moist and warming for another glorious spring day. Everything is perfect when I stop insisting of keeping my ‘self’. Suddenly it is all easy and I am back on the wide and wondrous path – and the pain in the neck is just a signpost for the right direction. Ah, fantastic. Since I finished this letter I had another discussion with Richard about being here now, in this moment in time, with having a past or a future, and I experienced again the eerie wonderful and odd thing of being here now without a ‘self-induced’ story that keeps the moments together like pearls on a string. From this point of view, from simply being here each moment again there is no question whatsoever that Actual Freedom is what I want, 24 hrs a day. And, being back in having a bit of a past and a bit of a future, I am still determined to make it happen, no other reason needed. The continuing oddness of not really knowing where I left the ‘meaning of life’ that had tied my life together so nicely before, can only be a good sign. Ahoi.
I just woke up from one of those wonderful light after-dinner naps and the memory is still so remarkably fresh that I thought of describing this little PCE to you. It was fascinating and delightful to have thoughts and half-thoughts while drifting in and out of sleep like in and out of water and at the same time the brain was aware of itself being half asleep and doing its fluid thinking. What an extraordinary thing our human brain is, I thought while dreaming along, that it can unwind its thoughts from the day, be aware of it at the same time and this all while I am on the couch taking a nap, and listening to Peter clicking away on the keyboard! Such a nap beats any sort of meditation by a country mile! I agree, there is nothing like a good nap. I did not talk about just having a good nap. I was trying to describe to you a pure consciousness experience that happened while I was in that hypnagogic state where one is asleep and aware of being asleep at the same time. From this utter relaxation it is very easy to watch the brain thinking – or, as Richard put it:
One more thing, there is one issue that I don’t quite get... Sometimes, out of a sudden, I experience ‘time of my life’. All is deliciously beautiful moment by moment and there are no problems whatsoever. But then there is this sweet feeling of ‘completeness’ and not needing anything else at all. Sometimes it just goes on and on for a while. It won’t stop while I look at it... What is your experience about it? I am not so sure what you mean by ‘time of my life’. Maybe you can describe to me your last ‘time of your life’. Peter and I have described our peak-experiences, when one’s sense of identity temporarily vacates the throne and apperception occurs. Life is then experienced as easy, obvious, safe, abundant and magical. Richard describes apperception as ...
Another option of ‘time of my life’ is an Altered State of Consciousness. The ASC is epitomised by a feeling of Oneness ... human love becomes Divine Love – what I call Love Agapé – wherein love ceases being a feeling and becomes a state of being ... ‘Pure Being’. This feeling of Union with The Divine – Unitary Awareness – is an Oceanic experience that assures immortality ... and is thus selfishness to its very core. Peace-on-earth is readily sacrificed for residing in this Deathless State. The difference between a pure consciousness experience and ASC is that there is no ‘feeling’ or emotion in a peak-experience. There is simply this obvious, sparkling, intimate experience of the perfection and purity all around. Such peak-experiences became the reference points for me to clean myself up, to reach this purity 24 hrs a day. In the peak-experience you know that the only problem is ‘you’ and you set out to eliminate ‘your’-self, bit by bit.
Until I experience that place where you’ve been I cannot tell. I had described this peak-experience so one can root around in one’s memory to find maybe a similar experience, where one was neither in the heart nor full of worries (‘in the head’), an experience where the ‘self’ is completely absent. Many people actually experience this state many times in their lives although most people forget about it – for there is no emotional ‘I’ present to record the moment on its affective ‘tape-recorder’. So you have to look for this memory, it does not just pop up, you have to root around to recall a situation where you experienced life and the world around you as crisp, clear, perfect and peaceful, without a feeling of beauty or love and without any separate sense of ‘self’. The advantage of the actual world is, you can reach it from anywhere, it is always here. Everybody can see a coffee cup as a coffee cup, a tree as a tree and hear a cricket as a cricket. No spiritual achievement is needed for that – on the contrary, it leads you further away from the actual experience of the physical senses. But to keep God in existence you need many beliefs – the belief that God is all-present, all-knowing, all-pervading, the belief that God loves you, that God created the universe, that God will take care of you and take care of your soul after death. Question those beliefs and you will watch God disappear in front of your very eyes. God, by whatever name, actually does not exist. You don’t have to go anywhere ‘first’, you can experience it any time. You can
start today by relentlessly questioning everything that is not evidenced by the physical senses, and what is left after all
beliefs are dismantled is the actual, the factual. It needs courage and a bloody-mindedness and a good deal of common sense –
but it is possible, one can start immediately.
Why, despite your transformation, are emotions still so important that you have to establish ‘mutual emotional credit’ first, before your ‘intelligence of the neocortex’ can begin to operate? Do you no longer practice ‘domination of emotions’? I hope this is no rhetorical question. If it isn’t I shall answer it. I begin to understand that people do not have emotions, but they are their emotions. Emotions are an expression of the social intelligence. There is a vital difference between ‘who’ I am and ‘what’ I am. ‘Who’ I am – my ‘self’, my identity, my ‘being’ – is determined both by the genetic instinctual programming and the social identity, or nature and nurture, as some may call it. ‘Who’ I am is both the instinctual passions and its resulting emotions and beliefs, whereas ‘what’ I am is this flesh and blood body. J. Krishnamurti made the assertion, that emotions arise out of thought. I didn’t believe it, but after a very extensive conflict with somebody on the Klavarskribo organ e-mail list, and meditating intensely on it, I saw that this was the essence of ‘the human condition’. Next to this, this is consistent with the Objectivist’ statement, that emotions are a manifestation in consciousness of automatic thought processes. Let me quote the Objectivists on this to show what emotions really are. Emotions as a Product of Ideas (Leonard Peikoff.) <snip> In other words, emotions stem from our thoughts! Exactly the thesis of J. Krishnamurti. This means, that to be truly to be without emotions, you must be without thoughts. Clearly, no actualist is without thoughts, if only because they all use language. You know, Konrad, when I experienced the world without the distorting veil of my emotional-instinctual ‘self’ in a pure consciousness experience, I saw everything as if for the first time. Everything was sparkling, pure, perfect, crystal clear and magical. With my ‘self’ temporarily absent I could see the world as it is and people as they are. I could also see that it is only ‘me’, the emotional-instinctual ‘self’, that stands in the way of experiencing this magical fairy-tale-like perfection 24 hours a day. From this first and many following PCEs I know that it is very well possible, despite your belief and that of thousands of others, to live without ‘self’ – without soul, without identity, without emotions and without the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. From the pure consciousness experience I also know that everyone else has got it wrong – every theory, every belief, every concept, everything we feel and think ourselves to be is not what we are. J. Krishnamurti, the objectivists, Carl Popper, the Buddhists, the Christians, the Agnostics, Mohan Rajneesh, and all the other teachers, believers and followers ... they all got it 180 degrees wrong. Fact is, when ‘me’, the emotional-instinctual entity inside this flesh and blood body, disappears then, and only then, there is peace on earth. The fashionable myth ‘that emotions arise out of thought’ is wrong and has always been wrong. Within the human condition most thoughts are emotion-backed, emotion-infused – they are contaminated with feelings tainted by instinctual survival passions and they are almost always self-centred. Examine and investigate your emotions and passions and you will find that your thoughts will become less frantic and more peaceful, less frequent and more capable of astounding clarity. The actualism method aims at eliminating the ‘self’, not eliminating the emotions. This is done by examining and thus diminishing good and bad feelings and increasing the felicitous feelings. If you do this with sincere intent and stubborn determination, it will eventually result in the collapse of the ‘self’ because the ‘self’ can only thrive on good and bad emotions – it does not get nourishment when I am happy.
So from Richard’s statement that his experiences with sleep and dreams are possibly idiosyncratic (which is still to be determined when a second person becomes actually free) you automatically assumed that the quality of how Richard experiences life 24hrs a day is just that – merely idiosyncratic to the specific body of Richard and has nothing to do with the fact that his ‘self’ in toto has become extinct? No 107: OK, is it possible, just as Richard admitted that he did not know if his experiences in sleep and dreams were typical of AF and did not assert that his personal experiences in sleep and dreams are the rule in AF, that other of Richard’s experiences in AF are personal and not ‘the rule’? A PCE, which everybody whom Richard has spoken to at length has been able to remember having had in their lives, easily confirms that the actual world as described by Richard exists as a fact and is neither ‘personal’ nor idiosyncratic. (…) Going by the topica list responses, some talk about PCE – I am not sure if the experience is same as you actualists talk about – because even those who agree had a PCE don’t subscribe to the mind boggling conclusion actualists are able to suss from such an experience – of the direct experience of infinity, godlessness, and so on; and a lot of the people don’t remember having; so why is this mailing list community sample so different from ‘everybody Richard has spoken to’? I said ‘everybody whom Richard has spoken to *at length*’. As for what you call ‘mind boggling conclusion’ – my first PCEs were mind-boggling in that I saw the world for the first time in my life not from the usual ‘self’-centred perspective a ‘self’ is bound to always see it – something which in itself is quite mind-boggling indeed. As I had more frequent PCEs and became more used to the new territory, so to speak, I was able to look around and use the clarity of a ‘self’-less experience to get answers on some burning questions I had. Maybe the most mind-boggling conclusion that I drew from one of my first pure consciousness experiences is that everybody, I mean everybody, including me, had got it 180 degrees wrong – we have all been suckered into believing in and following the wrong solutions, big time. Once I came to grips with this insight everything Richard had to report fell into place much more easily. * No 107: If you wish I can stop asking you questions and sharing my understandings or you can ignore them. Nowhere did I say that you should stop asking questions. What I am saying is that it makes no sense to me to answer your questions when all you do with it is invalidating my understandings regarding my experiences as mere beliefs. Vis –
Can you raise the bar a bit? Do you believe that Richard is actually free from human condition? In a pure consciousness experience where my own ‘self’ is temporarily absent it is blatantly obvious that Richard’s ‘self’ is also absent and that the report he gives about his experiences of the actual world is consistent with my own experiences of the actual world. As I had more PCEs over a period of time I was able to confirm that Richard was always already in the actual world whenever I happen to step into it which is consistent with his report that he always lives in the actual world. No belief required at all.
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.
RESPONDENT: Hey Vineeto, your comments are also welcome in regard to the different types of ‘knowledge’ derived from consciousness experiencing, as I remember you described both an almost full-blown ASC and a PCE VINEETO: Any ‘knowledge’ from full-blown altered states of consciousness is purely affective, and as such subjective, as you may remember from your own experience. In a spiritual altered state one usually feels as though one has entered into an ethereal reality. Whilst in this greater reality one feels as though one is above and beyond the social morals and ethics and as such is one prone to not only feel compassion for those ‘poor humans’ who are still enslaved by society’s rules and regulations but also feels that one knows all about this part of the human conditioning temporarily left behind – the outer layer of the ‘self’. In such a state one can have access to what are termed the ‘Akashic Records’, an expression to describe contents of the psychic web in which all sentient beings are more or less entrapped and entangled. In an altered state one can be psychically sensitive to what humans through the ages have affectively thought (all of the accumulated truths and wisdoms) and felt (all of the accumulated suffering) … and the power and glory of this feeling of omniscience and of being one with the ‘higher Being(s)’ is the trap that no enlightened being so far has been able to escape from, let alone even wanted to escape from … with one exception. A PCE is very different. One can have a PCE without much thinking happening – so delightful and magical is the direct sensate experience of the actual world that the notion to take notes as it were rarely occurs. Because I was on a quest to find out about the human condition and what to do with my life, during each PCE that I had after encountering actualism I was careful to take note of what was different in a PCE to normal experiencing and to ASCs and as a consequence had direct insights into what exactly is the difference between a ‘self’-centred and a ‘self’-less experience. My intent in a PCE was to gain as much insight about life without ‘self’ as possible and consequently I obtained valuable information that I could use once the PCE faded. The ‘knowledge’ I gained in each PCE was about that which is actual, i.e. that which remains when the affective faculty responsible for both my automorphic worldview and humanity’s anthropocentric view of the universe itself does not interfere with direct experiencing. It is as simple as taking one’s pink and one’s grey glasses off and then what has
been lying in front of your eyes all along becomes readily apparent.
No 32: Yes, I taste this freedom from time to time as I gradually let go of the various social protective masks and aspects of my identity. I begin to get a taste of the powerful instinctual passions, especially fear (habitual response to ‘losing’ something) and anger (habitual response for not ‘getting’ something) and the self-centred perspective they automatically create even when operating as a background noise. What I found was that the ‘background noise’ is actually the engine of
‘me’ running all the time ready to flare up at any given opportunity. Although the opportunities to ‘flare’ become more
and more rare, given that I am no longer bait for most of the usual follies and passions, the engine noise will only stop when
‘I’ am finally extinct. Wow, Vineeto. Just by reading this and other recent posts by you have I been able to realize some important things, and had questions answered. I say, how much of this ‘engine noise’ do you still experience these days? When I try to compare the current ‘engine noise’ to the level I experienced before I started practicing actualism I can only vaguely remember what went on in my head and heart back then as the process of dissolving one’s ‘self’ leaves no scars. What I do remember though is that I had an uninterrupted stream of mostly worrying thoughts and feelings, which dominated my day-to-day life and that I felt a desperate need for feel-good ‘holidays’ in order to recover from my constant worries and sorrows. When I began practicing actualism I naturally became more and more aware of the feelings that were driving those worrying thoughts and after I experienced the stillness of the absence of ‘me’ in a PCE it became all the more urgent to do something about the non-stop ‘noise’ of ‘me’. Nowadays I feel excellent almost all the time, i.e. the ‘noise’ of ‘me’ is no longer interfering with me being happy. However, the presence of my ‘self’ is noticeable enough for me to know that the virtual freedom I enjoy is not the end of the path. The stillness that is always here and that becomes apparent when ‘I’ temporarily disappear in a PCE is bait enough to entice me to go all the way. And to what extent do PCE’s pervade your life? As guiding lights the memories of PCEs pervade every moment of my life but PCE nowadays do not happen very often. At the beginning of practicing the actualism method I had many stunning insights into the human condition and quite a few of them stunned me into pure consciousness experiences. In the years of practicing attentiveness I have developed a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the human condition and of actuality and as a consequence those PCE-triggering insights have become less frequent. Once in a while a PCE sneaks up on me when I am the least expecting it but what I am more concerned about is the quality of my life between PCEs for this is when the real work happens. When all is said and done a PCE is not within my control, certainly not ‘my’ control, but how I experience my daily life is something I can do something about on a moment-to-moment basis, and that is what the method of actualism is all about. To put it differently – the job that ‘I’ need to do can only be done by ‘me’, in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are. And the moment I uncover the last bond and untie the last knot that connects me to humanity, ‘my’ demise will happen on its own accord.
[the only barometer to measure your experience is your own level of happiness/unhappiness] and ultimately the PCE experience. To me the memory of PCEs is the touchstone for the work that ‘I’ need to do and the guiding light on the wide and wondrous path. As long as I am an instinctual identity, a PCE happens serendipitously, once in a while and is not, as the word ‘barometer’ seems to suggest, an indicator and a reward for ‘good’ and ‘right’ behaviour. My first
This NEW possibility is actualised simply via the connection made between you and this Universe: pure intent. This isn’t pure intent, this is the old ‘waiting for Godot’ scenario … or in secular terms, ‘waiting for Scottie to beam me up’. You have apparently replaced whatever spiritual beliefs you had before with a new spiritual belief – pantheism. By believing the physical universe to be a metaphysical entity (Universe with a capital U) it appears you have created yet another mythical God with whom you only need to connect in order that He/She/It will bring you deliverance. This connection already exists because you, as this body, are an integral part of the physical Universe; IT manifests itself/ affects via the people, things and events of your everyday life. So, the process of ‘self’-immolation is not your doing, but the effect life’s facts/events have on a non-physical entity known as ... ‘you’. Well, I guess we had to have someone try and make actualism into a pantheist belief and take it up as a teaching. This mailing list does represent a potpourri of spiritual beliefs – and the only mantra they have in common is ‘above all, don’t try to change’. The ‘PCEs’ (my opinion) are used by the hardcore actualists in order to endorse/sustain their ‘actualist-self’. Once you experience a PCE, all the (repetitive) lingo associated with actualism will simply die out. I understood from what you have written on this mailing list that you have acknowledged that you cannot remember having had a pure consciousness experience. If this is the case, you seem to be basing your advice to others on what you think a PCE might be. And yet this is what you said above –
I also noticed that you made comment to someone else on this list as to the
authenticity of his experience, based on what you think a PCE is supposed to be. Personally I found the expression This ‘lingo’ is at least a warning sign that a person creativity, innate originality, authenticity are seriously affected. The PCE is supposed to be the height of a person’s genuineness and naivety, No. A PCE is a temporary experience of the total absence of ‘me’ – i.e. the absence of ‘me’ and ‘my’ disingenuousness and cynicism. … the infinite source for new and original thoughts; No. A PCE is a temporary experience of the total absence of ‘me’ – i.e. the absence of ‘me’ and ‘my’ hackneyed feelings and visceral thoughts. … it’s supposed to be as perfect, new and refreshing as each new moment. No. A PCE is a temporary experience of the total absence of ‘me’ – i.e. the absence of ‘me’ frees this body to sensately experience the seamless flawlessness of this moment. To describe this moment as ‘refreshing’ implies that previous moments were wearying or dull whereas even normal attentiveness reveals that this moment is ever-fresh, as in it has never been experienced before and can never to be experienced again. Look into the site and see how repetitive it all is. Yeah. Every time I come up with a good phrase or term Richard pinches it. He’s probably already got his eye on ‘conditional atheist’. The same thing also happens in my work – as soon as I came up with something that was good someone else would pinch it, exactly as I did whenever I found something good. It’s how we human beings learn to do things better. I use a good deal of Richard’s phrases in my writing, particularly the simple catch-phrases such as happy and harmless, because it made sense to me to do so. Having said that, the fundamental reason the website is repetitive is that what is being said is so utterly simple and not at all convoluted or complex. By the way, I have just given three descriptions of a PCE and I invite you to use your browser’s search engine and search the website in order to determine whether the descriptions are merely repetitive ‘lingo’.
VINEETO: This was my recent comment to a correspondent on this mailing list about this particular type of ASC –
RESPONDENT: First thing: neither of the above descriptions seems to quite match what happened to me. There was no ‘feeling of oneness’ or anything like that, no feeling that I am the Universe, no messianic urges, no sense of divinity, no sensory distortions, no feeling of being spaced out in a great ‘Nothingness’ or ‘Silence’ or ‘Stillness’ or ‘Void’ as described by mystics, and no loss of contact with the actual physical world around me. It was an ASC rather than a PCE, but of a rather different character from any kind of religious experience that I’ve heard or read about. (It was an LSD flashback, to be sure. I find it extremely interesting that it could be invoked at will, and I’m keen to understand what is actually happening here.) VINEETO: Even if an experience starts off as a PCE, most often ‘I’ will step in and seize the experience as being ‘mine’ and interpret it to be a perfect experience according to ‘my’ idea or ‘my’ feeling of perfection. Or if one tries to induce a PCE as a deliberate repeat of a serendipitous event, ‘I’ want to remain on the stage in order to posses the experience as ‘my’ own. You described it well when you said –
As for ‘there was no trace of emotion’ it is useful to understand that ‘I’, the alien entity within this flesh-and-blood body am not only lost and lonely but also very, very cunning. With this is mind your experience could well be interpreted in this light – if ‘I’ have to disguise myself as a non-emotional psyche in order to stay in existence, then ‘I’ will do just that. This is precisely why pure intent is so crucial if one wants to become actually free from the human condition. RESPONDENT: The underlying quality of my consciousness was very much like it was in the psilocybin experience I described earlier (walking through an invisible membrane into a bubble of perfection), except that there was more cognitive activity. That cognitive activity is extremely difficult to convey, but I emphasise that it did not eclipse or obscure the brilliance and clarity of the actual world, or make me feel I was a ‘spirit’, or that the world was illusory. Rather it complemented the actual world (as experienced by the senses) by exposing what seemed to be an innate pattern-matching / symbol-generating faculty in the psyche, which created a sense of underlying mathematical order and perfection pervading both mind and world. The real difference between this ASC and a PCE, as far as I can tell after a bit of reflection, is that this ASC is characterised by what you might call ‘scientific mysticism’, but not the ‘mythological mysticism’ of religious experience. (Having said that, though, there was no suggestion of ‘other words’ or ‘parallel universes’ or ‘alternative realities’, either. It was a different way of experiencing this universe, right here and right now.) To convey this more clearly, I’ll probably have to post some sketches of a much more extreme version of this pattern-matching / symbol-generating madness, which I experienced about 10 years ago on LSD (because this experience is very clearly an echo of that). I don’t have time to do right now ... but probably will later, because I suspect this is going to be a recurring theme with me. VINEETO: When I read your deliberations about the experience, two things come to mind. Firstly it is clear that you have no doubt that this ‘interesting experience’, as you called it, was an ASC and not a ‘self’-less PCE, so the difference is very obvious to you. Secondly, the perfection of the actual world is an innate quality to the infinitude of the physical universe, it is pure and magical but certainly not mathematically ordered as pure mathematicians would have it.
Many pure mathematicians apparently believe that mathematics is the governing principle upon which the universe was created and many even proclaim that God must have been a mathematician, or that pure mathematics is Truth. There seems no limit to anthropocentricity – it manifests itself in all sorts of weird and wonderful, and not so wonderful, forms. In a PCE I am both apperceptively and sensuously aware of what is actually happening and the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom is a journey of incrementally removing and abandoning all of one’s affective and imaginative programming that stands in the way of this experience of pure awareness. Whereas in an ASC ‘I’ interpret what is actually happening according to what ‘I’ feel and imagine as being good and right and perfect and as such the path to a permanent Altered State of Consciousness necessitates the embellishing of one’s emotional and imaginative programming, not the elimination of it. You alluded to this when you said that in your ASC your ‘cognitive activity’ ‘complemented the actual world’ and ‘created a sense of underlying mathematical order and perfection’, which can only mean that a psychic entity needed to be present in order to do the complementing and creating. In an ASC, as the name suggests, the psyche is altered, as in expanded, aggrandized, embellished, infused, refined and particularly flavoured according to the image or concept ‘I’ have of the perfect world. Once I had intellectually understood and personally experienced the world of difference between a PCE and an ASC, I rapidly lost interest in any detailed examination of the contents or contexts of ASCs – I simply saw them as being like wake dreams, outbursts of an excited, as in stimulated, electrified and/or feverish, psyche. P.S. If you haven’t already discovered this – there is a topic in the library
called
Even if an experience starts off as a PCE, most often ‘I’ will step in and seize the experience as being ‘mine’ and interpret it to be a perfect experience according to ‘my’ idea or ‘my’ feeling of perfection. For a while (not sure how long) when I was sitting on the rocks looking at the breakers foaming in, there was nothing but purity and perfection. When it became clear that something was definitely happening, something stunningly different from normality, ‘I’ must have stepped in and started playing around, and that’s when I found the same ‘plasticity’ that I’d delighted in 10 years ago. (You’re right, it is the most compelling ‘vision’ of perfection I had/have ever seen). The actualism method is certainly a very powerful tool and, as Richard emphasizes throughout his writings, the only danger on the wide and wondrous path is that one can become stranded on the Rock of Enlightenment, as Peter called it – or fall into any other permanent state of delusion. When I first used the actualism method I was quite curious to experience all of the different altered states that I had heard and read about but once I experienced two or three of them for a couple of hours or more each I could see the flaws in all of them when compared to a ‘self’-less PCE – neither were they pure nor were they a direct sensuous experience of what is happening here on earth were we human beings live – in other words, they weren’t actual but they were happening in my mind only. I do see the potential for this. It must seem as if I’m being quite defensive about the ‘validity’ of my ‘interesting experience’, but what I’m actually trying to do is firstly express it as clearly as possible, and secondly figure out where it belongs in the scheme of things. I do appreciate the feedback. You are welcome. I know from my own experience with actualism that feedback from other people’s experience can only go so far – I gained both reassurance and warning from Richard’s reports of his experiences but in the end I had to sort out my experiences for myself … and my benchmark for that was always my first major PCE. It was the experience of which I had the clearest memory simply because the difference to my normal day experience was so incredibly stunning and at the same time so unquestionably obvious. * Or if one tries to induce a PCE as a deliberate repeat of a serendipitous event, ‘I’ want to remain on the stage in order to posses the experience as ‘my’ own. This is true I guess, but what it felt like was not exactly a conscious desire to possess it as my own (though I do see the potential for that happening), but rather a desire to play around with it aesthetically, like a kid with a kaleidoscope. I suppose one can desire to ‘possess’ something for two different motives, either as a way of empowering and glorifying one’s ego, or as a way of entertaining oneself. I think the latter is probably what made this PCE into an ASC. (But I can accept that the self is very cunning indeed). ‘A way of entertaining oneself’ implies that being here is experienced as needing some more entertainment, which is an assessment that ‘I’ make because there is no role for ‘me’ to play in the stunning clarity and sensuous delight of being right here in this moment in time. The more I paid attention to how I experience this moment of being alive the more I began to learn about how cunning ‘I’ am, how many ways and reasons ‘I’ invent and present in order for ‘me’ to stay in existence. Well that really depends on what is meant by ‘I’ and ‘me’, doesn’t it? Being right here in this moment in time, can there be any sense of intention? In my experience, the answer is yes, for sure. When I am right here in a ‘self’-less PCE there is no intent, I am already experiencing perfection. The intent comes in when the PCE ends and ‘I’ make an assessment what it is that ‘I’ need to do in order to live this experience 24/7. In a PCE ‘who’ is it that dips his/her toes into a cool stream just for the joy of it? Dipping one’s toes in the stream doesn’t mean that ‘I’ and ‘me’ are there with all their status-seeking and emotional baggage, but the action happens. In a PCE there can be an ‘intent’, without there being an ‘intender’. In a PCE there is no ‘who’ to ‘dipping one’s toes in the stream’ but ‘what’ – this body delights in the coolness of the stream on a hot day. ‘Who’ is the psychological and psychic entity who thinks and feels ‘he’ or ‘she’ is in control, whilst in a PCE this controller is temporarily absent. There is no intent in a PCE for I am simply the doing and experiencing of what is happening. There can be thought without a thinker. Yes. In a PCE thoughts happen or don’t happen depending on the situation. * VINEETO: Often it would take me days to discover that I had once again fallen for ‘my’ tricks, that I had believed ‘my’ reasoning as to why ‘I’ needed to run the show. RESPONDENT: Ok, but while ever you are in ‘virtual freedom’ rather than ‘actual freedom’, you are indeed running the show. VINEETO: The wonderful thing about being virtually free of malice and sorrow is that ‘I’ have become increasingly redundant – less and less am ‘I’ experienced as running the show or needing to be in control. RESPONDENT: And part of the ‘you’ who is running the show is a ‘belief’ (for want of a better word) that ‘you’ as a psychic entity must disappear entirely in order to allow the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world to manifest itself. VINEETO: No. It was the ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience itself which revealed that normally there is an ‘I’ who thinks and feels she is running the show all the time and it also reveals that in order to allow the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world to manifest itself ‘I’ have to disappear. This is not ‘a belief’ but recognition of a fact via direct perception. (...) * RESPONDENT: I would argue (not to be contrary, and not to suggest that you are wrong to do so, but simply because it seems like the truth to me) that it is indeed ‘one of your tricks’ to treat as ultimately valid only those experiences in which ‘you’ are entirely absent. Within the terms of your goal (actual freedom), this is understandable. But that goal is necessarily ‘one of your tricks’, even if you choose to define it as the only thing that is not a trick. VINEETO: What you are arguing is that ‘my’ experiences of ‘my’ psyche are as equally valid as the only experience that is common to all flesh and blood bodies – the pure consciousness experience of the already-existing purity and perfection of the actual world. I can only suggest that you contemplate on the fact that it is precisely because everyone values their own psychic experiences so highly that peace on earth between human beings remains but a pipe-dream. RESPONDENT: Not trying to be a smartarse, but after virtually all of your social identity has disappeared, there remains ‘Vineeto the actualist’ (which is not itself actual). I know this doesn’t matter to you personally, but I say it nonetheless: I am not trying to criticise you in any way, just saying it as I see it. VINEETO: Four weeks ago you described a pure consciousness experience –
When you described the experience of ‘being present in a perfect bubble of real time and real space and real things’ – did you have any doubt that this experience was ‘one of your tricks’ or did you know beyond doubt that this was one of those rare events where your ‘self’ was absent and you were experiencing actuality as it is? I know, it is hard to remember what a PCE was like when one returns back to normal and
often one begins to doubt that the experience was only a dream. But during a PCE I know with absolute certainty that this actual
universe has always been here – I only missed it whilst I was busy being ‘me’. And the realization and recognition of this
very fact is what has become my benchmark for determining how to proceed in the process of becoming free of malice and sorrow. In
this process ‘I’ willingly decide to instigate ‘my’ own demise and then it is simply a matter of applying attentiveness
– something that anyone can cultivate if they so desire. * VINEETO: As for ‘there was no trace of emotion’ it is useful to understand that ‘I’, the alien entity within this flesh-and-blood body am not only lost and lonely but also very, very cunning. With this is mind your experience could well be interpreted in this light – if ‘I’ have to disguise myself as a non-emotional psyche in order to stay in existence, then ‘I’ will do just that. RESPONDENT: I can see the potential for that happening too, but I have to trust my own judgement here. There was no trace of emotion that I could detect; I actually looked for it, it just wasn’t there. VINEETO: Sometimes I found that missing something familiar could trigger ‘me’ stepping back in, in order to provide the ‘missing link’, so to speak. Vis:
At first I had only Richard’s report that he has no imagination whatsoever and that
imagination is an affective faculty of the psyche – later in the actualism process I could confirm this report by my own
experience in that my imagination more and more disappeared and nowadays I have a hard time to activate it, for instance when I
try to visualize objects others talk about that I have never seen. I don’t miss it though – it is one less distraction from
sensually experiencing what is right here. RESPONDENT: Right. I can understand this because in the PCE on a country walk I thought idly about where I was in relation to the town and river, found I could not construct a mental map, and did not give a damn. It didn’t matter in the slightest; it had no relevance. I was ‘here’, and that was all I needed to know. Besides, I was too busy perceiving to worry about creating some internal shorthand sketch of what was all around me in all its splendour. I do know what you’re talking about in this respect. VINEETO: Good. And I take it that there was also no ‘desire to play around with it aesthetically, like a kid with a kaleidoscope’ as there was in your ASC. Interesting Experience, 15.12.2003 RESPONDENT: However, I am now starting to think that one can have one’s cake and eat it too. VINEETO: Before you get carried away with this thought let me ask you how you think this would work in practice. The cake we are talking about is an actual freedom from the Human Condition, a ‘self’-less flesh-and-blood body living a pure consciousness experience 24/7. To ‘eat it too’ means to simultaneously have a psyche, which perceives the world as ‘pure’ in images and symbols? In other words you want to be ‘self’-less whilst remaining a ‘self’. You can certainly entertain this as a philosophy but never live it as an actuality. (...) * VINEETO: The question as to whether an actual freedom from the human condition ‘is actually possible for all people’ can only be answered on an individual basis because to achieve this freedom requires that an individual makes it the most important thing in his or her own life. Thus far I have met or have corresponded with very few people who are interested in doing so. If, however, you want empirical proof that an actual freedom does not require ‘a biological configuration unique to Richard’ then you will have to wait until a second, or third, person becomes actually free from the human condition. Personally, I didn’t want to waste my time waiting for that, I’ll rather be part of the proof. RESPONDENT: Yeah, I’m with you there. I dunno whether our paths will diverge or converge in the end, but having set off on the journey it’s very unlikely that I’ll turn back. I know it seems to you that I’m playing a different ‘game’, a self-centred game in which I’m desperately clinging to some cunning disguised form of ‘self’ as ‘psyche-as-medium’ in order to stay in existence, but it’s really not how it seems to me. VINEETO: The marvellous thing about actuality is that one cannot make it up, destroy it or alter it in any way – it is already here exactly as it is. Nobody can add to it, take anything away from it, shape it or diminish it, possess it for themselves or hide it from others and therefore nobody needs to hold it up or defend it – it is always here in all its splendour and perfection readily apparent whenever the bubble of the ‘self’ bursts. (...) * VINEETO: When I read your deliberations about the experience, two things come to mind. Firstly it is clear that you have no doubt that this ‘interesting experience’, as you called it, was an ASC and not a ‘self’-less PCE, so the difference is very obvious to you. RESPONDENT: Yep. The PCE I had last summer had none of this ‘pattern matching’ or ‘symbol-generating’, or ‘plasticity’, and the psyche was not ‘visible’ at all. There was an underlying similarity though that I can’t quite put my finger on, except to say that both seemed to have had a pure and perfect basis. VINEETO: Would it be right to say that the first was a pure, i.e. ‘self’-less, experience while the other was an image of a pure experience created by your psyche? RESPONDENT: Not quite. The other was an experience in which psyche was present, but it was not created out of or by the psyche. In both cases there was an underlying purity and perfection; in the latter case it was manifest in mind as well as in world. And the presence of a mind-medium (unlike ordinary ‘imagination’) did not in any way diminish the perfection and purity of the actual world as experienced by the senses. VINEETO: The purity of the actual world means that there is no ‘self’ or psyche present and it is the affective ‘self’ or psyche that distorts the clear perception of what is actual. If you decide to reinterpret ‘the perfection and purity of the actual world’
as being an experience of the psyche ‘manifest in mind as well as in world’ then we are talking about two different
things. It does make communication a little confusing though.
I’ve been reading up on Actual Freedom site since a few months and I’m glad I came across this wonderful practice. I used to meditate in the ‘Ramana Maharishi’ method for about 1.5 years. Later ‘knowledge’ showed the light and I became a materialist/Atheist. I found the AF practice extremely simple and testable. I’ve been successful and happy with my ‘results’ at inducing a PCE mostly when I’m ‘outside’ (i.e. walking on the streets, in the garden, etc.). Given that you say you ‘became a materialist/Atheist’ – have you been able to understand in what way an actual freedom from the human condition is the *third* alternative to both materialism and spiritualism? My typical experience of PCE is as follows:
Title: Is something wrong with my ‘PCE’? What is wrong with your PCE is that it is an altered state of consciousness but not a pure consciousness experience. Let me explain it according to your own description –
However, when I try to have a PCE in the middle of ‘intellectually demanding’ actions, things start going wrong and thus this post. Maybe those ‘‘intellectually demanding’ actions’ are really emotionally demanding actions? People often mistake their feelings to be thoughts, not recognizing the affective quality of most of their thoughts. IMO, ‘Intellectualism’ needs modelling a future action + an object within one’s mind and estimating how the ‘model’ behaves for any given decision [snipped link to AI]. I see ‘Intellectuality’ as being in direct conflict with ‘living this moment as a flesh and blood body’. In such a scenario, like when being at work, I only see lips moving and sounds emanating from people. ‘Words’ don’t make ‘meanings’ for the ‘I’ isn’t even around to care. Is this an inherent ‘side effect’ of practicing AF? Or am I doing something wrong? It would be great to hear experienced people’s thoughts on this. It appears that when you became a materialist/Atheist you nevertheless kept the spiritual idea that thoughts and consequently the content of words are impure and that therefore only a thoughtless body and meaningless sounds can be pure. Rather than it being ‘an inherent ‘side-effect’’ of practicing actualism this unliveable ethic of spiritualists and materialists alike is pure fantasy and can never work in everyday life. In actualism, I recognize that it is the instinctual passions and the identity arising from these passions that is the problem, not thoughts or words or ‘intellectualism’ per se. When you recognize this fact in theory – as in seeing that it makes sense – then you can begin to put this understanding in practice. This requires that I pay an ongoing attention to how I experience this moment – what do I think, what do I feel and how do I sensately experience this moment of being alive. This attentiveness alerts me to any of the non-felicitous feelings as and when they arise which allows me to feel the feeling (instead of the usual automatic reaction of repressing or expressing the feeling), in order to be able to label it, inquire what triggered it, examine what belief, moral or ethic may be responsible for having triggered it off, and so on. Eventually this attentiveness will result in unravelling all of one’s beliefs, ideas, ideals, philosophies, worldviews and social conditioning and enables one to become acutely aware of the instinctual passions as and when they arise. Being aware of one’s feelings and instinctual passions will in turn enable you to differentiate between your affective and your non-affective thoughts, the later of which quite commonly occur in PCEs as well as in virtual freedom.
To No 106: – (…) It is not important to label the experiences as PCE or not. (…) I disagree. If you want to become actually free from the human condition then it is vital to accurately ‘label the experiences as PCE or not’ because a pure consciousness experience is my touch stone and my guiding light, so to speak, to know what I want which direction I am heading and what I need to do to achieve my goal. A PCE is the one and only experience that makes me aware of and allows me to experience the actual world that lies hidden beneath the elaborate, confusing and ever-changing chimera created by the identity inside this body and a PCE is the one and only experience that can clearly guide me towards an actual freedom from the human condition. Besides, unless one is able to accurately label a PCE as such and an altered state of consciousness as a non-PCE one will remain dependant on the words and experiences of others and can never be free from this dependency and the resulting resentment of such external authority.
I was practising Vipassana with the intent to be as happy and harmless as possible while facing the numerous feelings of both hardship and bliss that were revealed by the scrutiny of attentiveness, in order to eliminate those feelings and end up more happy and harmless... and what followed was a period of genuinely feeling really good, and then of naiveté and felicitous sensuousness, and then that resulted in a PCE! No 60: Sounds like actualism with your eyes closed! Yeah that’s what I thought too, and it worked. Given that you have asked for my input This is not to say that a PCE cannot occur doing the original Vipassana or anything else for that matter – I had a PCE whilst helping in a ‘Fisher-Hoffmann’ emotional release process, during a ‘Who-Am-I’ group, during an Avatar technique session and even during a discourse of Rajneesh, all of which I only recognized as PCEs in hindsight. A PCE, being a glitch in the generally operating control-program of ‘me’, can happen any time in life under the most ordinary or extra-ordinary of circumstances. However, if I want to not only have PCEs occur on a regular basis but also use them as a tool for becoming free from the human condition then it makes sense to stick with the process of actualism so as to avoid slipping into altered states of consciousness or getting hooked on the experience only whilst ignoring the process of becoming increasingly free from malice and sorrow. * No 60: (Or does it have ... ‘spiritual’ ... side-effects in your experience perhaps?) It has in the past, yes. I should point out though that my attitude towards it was different then. I considered the dissociated ‘I’ a stepping-stone toward a PCE. I didn’t recognise the basic, subtle resentful attitude that is in operation often, and so I rarely did anything about it, choosing instead to tranquilise the things it gave rise to… basically, controlling the instincts instead of eliminating them. On that course, I didn’t notice any spiritual side effects. I haven’t really sat much since because I just haven’t felt like it. My life’s been markedly better than before since I started with actualism in November last year. Sitting does make me feeling good, and I’m thinking of doing it from time to time as a way of giving myself a kick-start and activating delight… but I want to talk to Richard and the gang about it too. I am not surprised that you ‘haven’t really sat much since’ as I had the same experience. Why waste my time sitting in the corner with my eyes closed when I can instead be out and about enjoying being alive doing everyday things! Besides, I found that the trouble with wanting to integrate some old (spiritual) practices into the practice of actualism was that this would generally blur the distinction between the spiritual goal of dissociation and transcendence to a higher ‘Self’ on one side and the actualist’s goal of ‘self-immolation or ‘self’-diminishment as in a virtual freedom on the other. And going by my own experience, particularly in the beginning of practicing actualism I needed all the help for clarity that I could give myself. Two things I particularly remember that helped me ‘kick-start and activating
delight’ in the beginning – one was to deliberately change my habit of only being focussed on my plans and worries of the
day the moment I awoke, and instead pay attention to my surroundings, the delights of the ever-changing weather and the many
little sensate delights whenever they happened. The other was to regularly take time out, look around me, enjoy the weather,
notice my fellow human beings, the delightful interactions that do occur and then, especially after an eventful day, put up my
feet and contemplate about the specific events of the day, about the human condition in me and the feelings that occurred, why
they occurred, and how I could prevent me from getting upset the next time round. Inevitably, having worked out some emotional
problem that had surfaced in the day, would automatically re-activate delight and make me aware of how good life really is when
all the petty worries of the day are neatly left behind.
Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. |
