When I removed the top layers of my censor, the self-image which covered up my inner ‘being’ and formed a layer of denial of my ‘negative’ feelings, I found some fascinating stuff. ‘I’ had learnt from childhood how to cover them up and sometimes express the opposite: if ‘me’ hated somebody, ‘I’ would express ‘friendliness’ so that the inner hate goes undetected; this cover-up job gave a great strength of not revealing my weaknesses and reprehensive feelings and ‘I’ was considered a very good person. However ‘I’ forgot that ‘me’ exists in the process and started believing that ‘I’ portrayed the ‘me’: whereas ‘I’ was mostly false and totally opposite of the true ‘me’. And the structure of ‘I’ was so contradictory because of denial on the top of denial – because circumstances, group loyalties kept changing and ‘I’ totally lost track of my ‘true’ feelings if there was any such consistent whole. When ‘I’ dared to go deeper, ‘I’ saw that ‘me’ had never been felt totally – though it was breaking the stranglehold of ‘I’ a lot – which was contributing to the hypocrisy and corruption.

One of the most fascinating discoveries in actualism for me was to look under the carpet, so to speak, of the social identity – and find the pure instinctual being in its raw passions underneath. In spiritual practice I had learnt to suppress, disregard, deny and discard some of my previous social identity and replace it with an ‘enhance-the-good-instincts-dissociate-from-the-bad-instincts’ spiritual identity – a cunning ploy which slightly shifted the goalpost but did not reveal the core of ‘me’ – the raw instinctual passions that form themselves into my ‘being’.

One’s social identity has a vital role to play to curb the instinctual passions from running rampant so as to prevent unrestricted violence amongst humans. However, with the pure intent to become as happy and harmless as human possible, an actualist can dare to lift the lid of the social straightjacket of morals and ethics and begin to experientially discover the instinctual animal passions that are inherent to all sentient beings.

Isn’t it fascinating how the very act of bringing those passions to the light of awareness, coupled with the pure intent, can actually diminish their power, intensity and frequency of occurrence and by doing so reduce their influence on one’s life? – that’s at least my experience from my explorations into my psyche.

One of the interesting feeling was some kind of dislike (fear? hate?) towards Richard and Peter and Vineeto though I was doing a good cover-up job – ‘I’ was impressed by their clarity, expertise, achievement though ‘me’ was generating a negative reaction. Questioning deeper revealed that the factors that contributed to the feeling was their stubbornness and authority (though they were not desiring power over ‘me’): they were incorruptible by ‘my’ tricks that ‘I’ had known all along: become a ‘friend’ and then corrupt using ‘my’ inner agenda: ...

I can well understand the fear of being naked but I also know the relief and joy of having nothing to hide. One outcome of digging beneath the layer of the social identity with the intent to becoming happy and harmless and seeing ‘me’ as I am – an instinctually driven ‘being’ – was that self-honesty and integrity came to the surface because I was exposing myself. This has now made hypocrisy, obscuration and pretence along with the fear of being found out a thing of the past.

The identity is comprised of (not necessarily distinct) these parts: ego aka thinker, feeler aka soul, social identity, instinctual self, correct?

When I began to write on mailing lists about my experience with actualism, I first used the terms mainly used in spiritual circles to describe the identity – ego and soul, or thinker and feeler. However, as I explored more and more of my psyche and became more familiar about the nitty gritty of ‘me’ in operation, I found that the terms ‘social identity’ and ‘instinctual identity’ describe more accurately the two layers of my identity, the social identity being the layer of conditioning acquired after birth in order to curb the instinctual identity and its genetically encoded instinctual passions. This is just a preference that I have as I personally find the terms to be more descriptive and concise in conveying what I mean to others – contrary to what some believe there are no rules governing terminology around here.

Also the attributes or even the material by which the identity is made of is – feelings and emotions, instinctual passions, and thoughts (seldom free of emotions when an attribute of identity). Is this correct?

To the list of what the identity consists of I would add beliefs (feeling-fed thoughts about who rules the ethereal world and ‘my’ place in the hierarchy of the spiritual world), concepts (feeling-fed thoughts about ‘my’ place in the hierarchy of the materialistic world), moral and ethical values (feeling-fed thoughts about what is good and bad, right and wrong), vibes, myths and psittacisms.

There is no material by which the identity is made of, in that there is no ego in the head, or a little man pulling the levers and controlling the body, nor is there a soul located in the heart or a real me deep down inside as an actuality. However both aspects of one’s identity, whilst not being actual and having no material existence, are experienced as being very real – feelings are very real to the person having them. Beliefs are very real to the person who holds them dear, morals and ethics can dominate a person’s thoughts, actions and feelings, instinctual passions are very often overwhelming in their strength, and so on. In fact, the identity and his or her associated attributes are so real, so dominating and so overwhelming that they cause human beings to be nearly always in wary mode, defence mode, or attack mode – exactly as other animals are.

Is there a hierarchical structure to these various parts of the identity? Is it that one is operational at a given time not others – or – they all orchestrate with each other one feeding on the other like the legs of the millipede?

I found that because my social identity was mainly a training to curb my instinctual passions, particularly the so-called bad passions, I first had to whittle away at this layer of my identity in order to allow the deeper and stronger passions to emerge such that I could take a good look at how and why they operated. But this is not necessarily a smooth operation – sometimes just a crack in the outer layer reveals a bit of what is underneath, sometimes a big crack opens up and one gets a quite often shocking glimpse at what can be described as ‘the raw animal inside’ and sometimes one breaks right through the lot and a pure consciousness experience results when all of a sudden the whole centre and the protective circumference of my identity disappears … as if by magic.

The baby is born with these raw instinctual passions, basic software to protect itself from some of the dangers and situations – also with things like ‘theory of mind’ (which is later programmed or tuned more) – this is the instinctual self.

As I understand it the ‘theory of mind’ develops at about age 2-3, therefore I would say all humans are born pre-primed to think and feel themselves to be a separate ‘self’.

And with time – are these same instinctual passions fine-tuned to give rise to various feelings and beliefs and emotional behaviour patterns by societal conditioning?

The instinctual passions are never fine-tuned – in my experience they were only overlaid with social conditioning. I was only able to conduct a clear-eyed investigation of the instinctual passions in their full force once I was ready, able and willing to incrementally lift the lid of my beliefs, morals, ethics, values, ideals and principles that are the very constituents of my social identity.

When do I know I have come face to face with a raw instinctual passion – not just a conditioning of social identity – is this when the ‘social identity’ is deleted to a great extent – so as to see the underlying ‘instinctual passion’ devoid of the thinking distortions that usually accompanies it?

This is how Peter described it in the ‘The Actualist’s Guide’ –

Once sufficient of this dismantling of one’s social identity has been done, it is then possible to begin to experience the instinctual passions deeply without acting on them – once the ‘lid is off’ then I can have a good look around inside – neither repressing nor expressing – and begin to experience ‘me’ at the very core of my being. The only way it is possible to undergo a significant change in life is by experiencing something deeply and understanding the experience fully. I don’t know about a map at this stage – it’s more like throwing away the water wings and snorkel, strapping on a scuba tank, plunging into one’s own psyche and rummaging around the bottom, looking under all the rocks in order to see what the bottom really looks like. Peter, An Actualist’s Guide

Or is it (I think I read it in Peter’s journal) when I get to this point where I don’t see any reason for the fear or the strong emotion – it is just there – then I know it is an instinctual passion? If this is the case, I have come across situations where I have a strong emotion and I see that there is no reason for it to be there, at least I don’t believe that it is apt at that time.

The way I determined that I had come across an underlying instinctual passion was by the sheer intensity of the passion that welled up like a giant octopus, sometimes for no apparent reason. In such instance it was not that I had become upset about a belief that was attacked or that an aspect of my social identity that had been exposed – I knew I was experiencing something deeper and far more substantial than feelings – it was naked fear, pure rage, bottomless dread, sheer lust to kill, or the mindless intoxication of nurture.

Also I thought about another ‘Spiritual Freedom’ vs ‘Actual Freedom’ item when I was reading one of the pages (if this is not already tabled): In the former, one is a saviour of humankind (at least (s)he feels/thinks so) and in the latter ‘one is an expert in human condition’ (unless in the future, the babies are born free – in which case they will be without such expertise except vicariously).

Yepp, I have felt, and in that moment experientially understood, the overwhelming feeling of ‘knowing it all’ and the urging need to spread this wisdom revealed to ‘Me’ in a full-blown ASC that lasted several hours. As for ‘one is an expert in human condition’, I can only talk from the perspective of Virtual Freedom but I would say I am only partially an expert in the human condition in as far as I have explored my own psyche, which to a certain extent is the human psyche, and I am certainly an expert in how I became virtually free from the human condition.

However, there are many, many aspects of the human condition, cultural nuances, tribal rites, personal obsessions, weird passions, senseless beliefs and elaborate philosophies that I don’t know and neither have I the slightest interest in gaining such expertise. In any case, everyone has to do the job to take himself or herself apart if they choose to become free from the particular bent of their own social identity in order to firstly become virtually free of malice and sorrow. For this, one doesn’t need to be an expert in the human condition – ‘you’ only need to be an expert in what it is that is stopping you from being happy and harmless, no more and no less.

As an example of this, Richard had little intellectual knowledge about the instinctual passions before he became free of them – it was only Peter’s curiosity that prodded him to find out more and to write about them in more detail. Actualism is after all an experiential business, not an intellectual one.

The idea that in some distant future babies will be born free from the instinctual programming … can only be speculation at this stage.

VINEETO to No 47: When I disentangled myself from the spiritual practice of dissociation I began to allow myself once again to become sensitive to my own undesired feelings as well as to the perversities and horrors of the human condition. In short I allowed myself to feel the full range of my emotions in order to examine them and trace them back to ‘me’, the affective identity inside this flesh-and-blood body. When a reaction to a certain situation kept creeping up again and again, avoiding giving it ‘credence’ was not enough. I had to feel the feeling, label it, sort it out, understand it in the context of my social identity and figure out which part of ‘me’ was responsible for my emotional reaction in order to become free from it. Then I could go back to feeling excellent again and, as a result of this rooting around, was less prone to be disturbed by a similar situation. Vineeto, The Actual Freedom Mailing List, No 47, 4.11.2003

RESPONDENT: Thanks for the very lucid and succinct description of the actualism method; I would like to just add my observations to what you said (I have divided your description into three parts):

I think a) is extremely important. If not done diligently, it leads to denial of the feeling and also distortion of steps b) and c). If I don’t fully feel and acknowledge the feeling/ emotional reaction, it means that I have not fully come to terms with the whole of the feeling; I still have some vested interests in continuing to feel that way and I would trick myself to lie in the surface if I don’t take a good look at the whole of the feeling. It seems to be so difficult to stay with the feeling.

VINEETO: It’s usually difficult to acknowledge and feel a feeling when the particular feeling is either socially unacceptable or personally undesired, i.e. when to feel this way does not concur with one’s morals and ethics and/or one’s image of oneself. You described it well in your recent letter to No 4 when you said –

[Respondent]: … funnily the ‘self-image’ I had of myself, say 18 months ago when I came to the list, was totally wrong as it was a product of so many denials and only after digging deep I could see all the stuff I was denying. 7.11.2003

That’s why the questioning of one’s spiritual beliefs and one’s moral and ethical values is crucial for successfully investigating one’s feelings – I had to dare to go past the ‘guardians at the gate’ and take apart my social identity.

Peter: This identity consists of the morals and ethics that have been drilled into us from the time when we were first rewarded for ‘good’ and ‘right’ behaviour and punished for ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour. We are thus taught to emphasize and highly value the ‘good’ instinctual passions and to repress and control the ‘savage’ passions. Our social identity is in fact made up of the morals, ethics and values that are programmed into us by our parents, teachers and others to ensure that we will become a fit, useful and loyal member of the particular society into which we were born. Introduction, Normal Solutions

One thing that I found useful in this process of dismantling my social identity was when I became aware of a feeling that interrupted my feeling good and I had given it a name, I then identified this feeling with a specific aspect of my social identity. In my case when I felt annoyed with something that Peter said or didn’t say or did or didn’t do I would acknowledge that I was annoyed and then recognize that it was ‘Vineeto the woman’ and ‘Vineeto the lover’ who was annoyed and this made it clear that if I wanted to stop reacting in that way then ‘Vineeto the woman’ and ‘Vineeto the lover’ would have to go. (...)

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RESPONDENT: c) brings back the focus on enjoying the moment and the purpose of the investigation is to find and remove the obstacle that took away from feeling good/ excellent/ perfect. The real test for correctness of the above steps is simply that it becomes once again possible to get back to feeling good/ excellent/perfect. At least the current problem has been understood and eradicated.

VINEETO: Yes and when the problem reoccurs I examine it again, I shine the bright light of awareness onto it, maybe explore it on a deeper level and come to understand how ‘I’ tick more deeply and comprehensively.

In every investigation a crunch point eventually comes when ‘I’ realize that the only way I am going to raise the bar of actually becoming more harmless and consequently feeling more happy is to let go of, or drop, a significant part of my social identity – in my case I was no longer a German, no longer a spiritualist, no longer a socialist, no longer a member of the sisterhood, and so on.

Change does mean change and change does have consequences. For an actualist the over-arching intent to become more happy and more harmless outweighs any consequences that the stripping away of one’s social identity may have.

One of the most striking things to happen to me since I started practising Actualism is the diminishment of emotional connections to other human beings.

You are right; ‘the ‘need’ to affiliate’ is a sticky business. I remember clearly when I saw Peter for the first time not as an affiliate of any kind but as a separate-from-me fellow human being. In an instant of clear perception, all ‘my’ sticky psychic tentacles that automatically reach out both to objects and to people around me had fallen away. From this particular insight I gained an understanding about what usually happens in interaction with others. I began to see, and unravel, the connections that ‘I’ spun with others, the deals ‘I’ struck, the bargains ‘I’ committed to and the mutual obligations ‘I’ engaged in during my daily interactions with people, particularly those I considered ‘my friends’.

You are certainly right when you say you are ‘seeing the hand of the instincts in all these myriad forms of behaviour and feelings’ . The first layer of my feelings and behaviour towards other people was mainly due to social role-play, defined and governed by the social identity ‘I’ thought and felt ‘I’ was. As a social identity, I was a member of a spiritual belief system and mostly intermingled with other believers, I was a sister to women friends, I was flirting with men I felt attracted to and suspicious towards every other man. The more I unravelled my social identity – the spiritual part being the most tenacious to take apart and leave behind – the more the underlying instinctual feelings that were the source of my emotions and attitudes towards other people became apparent.

Yes, and the good part is that when you make yourself ‘expendable’ to society you then become able to enjoy the freedom from the straightjacket of the social patterns as well as the reciprocal expectations and demands that go along with belonging to a certain group in particular, and to society at large. It used to be essential to ‘me’ to be useful to society because this usefulness provided ‘me’ with meaning, with a moral right to be here, the right to take up space so to speak. As I investigated whatever I felt was preventing me from being happy and harmless, I quickly came to question and explore my need to derive meaning from belonging to a group and being useful to society. Again and again I found this need to be sourced in the need to justify ‘my’ existence, ‘my’ very survival.

Nowadays the idea of needing to earn my ‘right to be here’ is patently silly because, as this physical body, I am already here. It is exquisitely enjoyable to be ‘expendable’ to society because the meaning of life is not to be found in attaining a particular place or status in society’s ranks but is to be found in ‘self’-less experiencing and delighting in the purity and splendour of the actual world.

Animals appear to thoroughly enjoy life, unless they’ve been damaged psychologically. Is being happy our birthright, which we typically squander?

As for ‘is being happy our birthright’ – it does not make sense to call happiness our ‘birthright’ because there is no court where you could claim your ‘right’. I would rather describe it that the animal survival passions, universally manifest in humans as malice and sorrow, are our biological heritage – ‘me’ being as old as the first human – but a path to freedom from this software programming is now laid out. You can jump right on with both feet and complete the next step in human evolution.

The idea that ‘the social conditioning be the software programming, and the instinctual passions be the hardware programming’ is instilled by spiritual teachings and psychological theories that lay the blame of all the ills of mankind on social conditioning.

The uniqueness of Richard’s discovery is that he proved by example that one’s instinctual passions are permanently deleteable and therefore as much software as one’s social conditioning. One need not trust Richard that this is so because everyone has had a PCE at some time in their life when both ‘I’ as ego – one’s social identity – and ‘me’ a being – one’s instinctual identity – are temporarily in abeyance. In a PCE both ‘software programs’ crash simultaneously, leaving this body free of any identity whatsoever – as such, a PCE is experiential evidence that the instinctual passions are not hardwired.

I could suggest that the developed intelligence has a cultural bias, and hence is affected by conditioning, but that’s starting to get a bit nitpicky and probably not worthy of pursuit.

Why should exploring the link between intelligence and social conditioning be ‘nitpicky’ on a list dedicated to exploring the human condition? On the contrary, it’s absolutely ‘worthy of pursuit’ to investigate how one can free one’s intelligence from one’s inevitably acquired ‘cultural bias’, which is not part of intelligence per se. As such any of my cultural bias, which prevents me from harmoniously living with my fellow human beings, needs to be eliminated.

To give you an example – when I was a young student I believed that certain German traits were common to all humans on the planet until I came to India and discovered that Indians lived by a whole different set of traits, often quite opposite to those I had learned. My ‘self’-oriented horizon widened even more when, living in an international community, I had opportunity to study all sorts of national cultural traits. I also discovered that whilst I could easily let go of some of my acquired traits, other traits were deeply rooted in who I thought and felt I was.

To separate intelligence from its cultural bias is fairly easy in practice – whenever you are not happy and harmless, then it is either your social identity or your instinctual identity that is interfering with the free operation of your intelligence.

I wonder what’s the point of your point, i.e. what’s the relevance of this hypothetical example. My experience with the various aspects of my social identity, such as spiritual beliefs, belonging to a nation, a group, a family, a gender or a work-related social club, was that particular aspects of my social identity, when investigated and understood, disappeared without a trace – often I had trouble remembering what it was that I had hung unto so desperately or what had been so important and defining ‘me’ just a little while ago. Each aspect of one’s identity, when understood in its totality, vanishes without leaving as much as a scar or even a memory.

It all becomes clear in the doing.

As for your example of a man having grown up amongst wild animals – when a person is actually free then he or she is completely free from his or her instinctual passions as well as from his or her social identity – no matter what the content of his or her previous identity had been. Therefore the intelligence in a person free from the human condition is unencumbered by their former identity. You could safely assume that just as my previous German social conditioning does not bias my intelligence today, his belonging to the wolf-tribe wouldn’t bias his intelligence. In that sense his intelligence would indeed be similar to yours or mine – intelligence being solely a function of the brain, an organ of the flesh and blood body – provided all three were free from the human condition.

Something Peter wrote in his Journal goes along with this assumption –

Peter: A statement that particularly struck me about Cro-Magnon was that they were fully modern in anatomy, behaviour and language ability and could have been taught to fly a jet plane. I baulked at this but there is evidence, even in my lifetime, of so-called primitive people who, given a modern education or training, are indeed capable of flying a jet plane. Yet despite this capacity for intelligent thinking, nothing much has basically changed in human behaviour in the last 40,000 years. War, rape, torture, suicide, persecution, domestic violence, and despair are still endemic. Peter’s Journal, Evolution

As for a person’s sensuous preferences, choices, particular behaviour or personal quirks, when free from the human condition, one can only speculate and such speculations are of no relevance to the actualism process.

If you want to experientially discover in what ways your intelligence would benefit from actualism, you will need to abandon philosophizing about what would happen if a ‘wolf boy were to practice actualism and succeeded in deleting the wolf-cultural bias and the instinctual programming’ and begin to actively inquire into your own cultural bias, i.e. into you own dearest beliefs. You will then discover that intelligence improves in direct correlation to the diminishing of beliefs.

As for ‘I just keep discovering more fear and malice and compassion’ – it is quite amazing what is revealed when the light is switched on in the hidden corners of one’s psyche, so to speak, and all the previously unseen and unknown ‘ghosts’ come to the fore. Whilst this can appear at times as if things are getting worse, this discovery is the very result of taking the lid off the hypocritical morals and ethics and paying exclusive attention to what is really going on.

It is important to always keep in mind that actualism is not about abandoning the spiritual world and going back to reality. Actualism is about leaving both grim reality and its panacea Greater Reality behind and stepping into the actual world of benevolent perfection that is temporarily but unmistakably evident in a PCE. As such, it is vital to remember that actualism is not about dwelling on the invidious emotions that one invariably becomes aware of in the process of actualism but that the aim of the process is to encourage the flourishing of the felicitous feelings – those that are happy and harmless.

Yes, the social conditioning of ‘whipping myself into shape’, be it the practice of beating yourself up or the practice of ‘self’-empowerment, is just as interfering with one’s being happy and harmless as indulging in emotions or expressing them towards others. The actualism method is specially designed to detect these deeply imbedded patterns. Increased attentiveness to either ‘self’-punishing or ‘self’-indulging behaviour reveals that I can stop acting along those lines and that I have a choice to be sensible. It takes a good deal of persistence because not only have those patterns been imbibed since very early childhood, they are also literally the building blocks of one’s precious identity, ‘who I think and feel I am’. As you seem to be discovering, it needs pure intent and investigative attentiveness in order to bring about lasting change.

As this is obviously your adventure and your exploration into depth of the Human Condition in you there is nothing much I can add. I myself had several complicated relationship situations in my life, so I know it is not an easy task. I have learned a lot of those situations, about me, about relationship and about the things that don’t work.

The most important point for me when starting on the path to Actual Freedom was to remember that it is always only me that I can change and that I can make free. I can never do anyone else’s job and nobody can do anything for me. That’s the very nature of an actual freedom.

One of the first things I had to learn and successively understand was that obeying the ethical and moral rules of society or religion was not going to help me to reach the purity and perfection so clearly experienced in a pure consciousness experience. As long as I oriented myself on the ideas of right and wrong it always left one party ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’ and neither peace nor equity were ever achieved.

My ideas of what was morally good or ethically right would stop me inquiring, fearing to do something ‘wrong’, violating the moral code and ethical value of the tribe, the peer group and the spiritual / religious group I had belonged to. First I had to understand the workings of those moral and ethical rules in me before I could inquire further into the nature of my feelings, emotions and passions.

Peter: The rudimentary animal instinctual ‘self’ we are born with is overlaid with a ‘social’ identity, instilled since birth by our peers. This identity consists of the morals and ethics that have been drilled into us from the time when we were first rewarded for ‘good’ and ‘right’ behaviour and punished for ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour. We are thus taught to emphasize and highly value the ‘good’ instinctual passions and to repress and control the ‘savage’ passions. Our social identity is in fact made up of the morals, ethics and values that are programmed into us by our parents, teachers and others to ensure that we will become a fit, useful and loyal member of the particular society into which we were born.

Usually we divide our instinctual passions into groupings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and try either to repress or deny the bad ones – fear and aggression – while giving full vent and validity to the good ones – nurture and desire. Unfortunately this well-meaning attempt to curb fear and aggression by moulding ‘good’ and ‘loving’ citizens has had precious little success as is evidenced by all the wars, murders, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, corruption, loneliness and despair and suicides that are still endemic on the planet. The fact that we have to rely on reward and punishment, laws and lawyers, courts and jails and police and armies in order to maintain law and order is testimony to the continuing failure of humans to live together in anything remotely resembling actual peace and harmony. Introduction to Actual Freedom, Normal Solutions

Having experienced the purity and perfection of the actual world and the intent to live that pure consciousness experience 24 hours a day, every day I could safely begin to abandon the moral and ethical codes that society imposed on me. Thus I whittled away at my social identity and its ensuing notion of right and wrong, good and bad. Now I can dig into the feeling that arises, find the root cause and understand why, when and how I feel this way, without the fear of ‘being wrong’ or ‘being bad’. Knowing the actual world from the memory of my PCEs I can determine what is ‘silly’ and ‘sensible’ and act according to what is sensible and best for everyone involved.

Being a bit lazy I dug out some questions that Richard has answered on the subject of ethics and morals – the first obstacle to be tackled before one can really decide about silly and sensible action ...

Co-Respondent: I would ask you a question: In your post-enlightened state, is there a source of morality and ethics in the individual, or are they all artificial?

Richard: All morality and ethics (externally reinforced internal control systems) are artificial ... and are only necessary for those who still nurse the malice and sorrow (born of the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire) to their bosom. When one is free from the human condition there is nothing that needs to be controlled by any society’s artificial mores.

Co-Respondent: What is the basis of ‘right action’?

Richard: Twenty four hour a day happiness and harmlessness ... which condition is the result of the total eradication of ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul (the entire identity who is the product of the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire). Richard, List B, No 36, 1.10.1999

A good point, I never looked at it that way. In my investigation into my social identity I was not so much concerned about the alleged masculine/ feminine principle of the universe but I was much more interested in the differences of conditioning, beliefs, behavioural and emotional patterns and the continuous power battle between man and women, no matter how subtle or covert. New age therapy blurred the distinctions of the roles a bit on the surface but underneath one’s ‘flirtation’ with the so-called inner male or female is hidden an instinctual desperate battle for power which has up to now prevented couples from peacefully living together in equity, parity and intimacy. I had to dig into my identity of what I felt and instinctually knew I was as a woman, and investigate and eradicate each single idea, notion, belief and feeling of ‘woman-ness’ in order to experience the actual intimacy with a member from ‘the other camp’ that we now enjoy. After an initial rocky time, Peter and I were able to put a permanent halt to the battle of the sexes and had immense fun in comparing notes, having ‘a spy in the other camp’, so to speak, and digging deeper and deeper into the so-called mystery of gender and the supposed mystique of sex.

As a second stage, underneath the obvious socially and religiously / spiritually learnt differences between the sexes, I discovered the workings of male and female instincts. It was utterly fascinating to observe the sexual instincts in me in action, after the sexual taboos, the moral limitations and feelings of love and authority had been stripped away. It was daunting and bewildering at first, perceiving myself as nothing but a female animal wanting to become pregnant, to be filled with the male’s sperm to fulfill my instinctual destiny – the fact that I had been sterilized fifteen years earlier did not change that urge at all. Exploring these instinctual passions to their full extent, and comparing notes with Peter, I finally understood the dilemma of male-female instinctual behaviour that spoils every relationship. While males, besides fatherly care, are instinctually driven to spread their semen as far and prolific as possible for the benefit of the species, females are programmed to search for and then hold on to one reliable protector to care for them and their offspring. It is one thing to have read about those instinctual differences, amongst other theoretical, psychological and spiritual deliberations, it is quite something else to experientially explore one’s instinctual sexual core – there is nothing refined or intelligent about our core passions. Blind nature does not care a bit about anybody’s well-being, natural forces are merely concerned about the survival of the species, and this happens by the traditional recipe which has worked for other mammals for millions of years. Possessiveness, jealousy and rape are all part and parcel of this instinctual animal drive for reproduction.

Love is merely a human invention to cover the embarrassment of being animal at one’s very core.

I was raised a Catholic and I know the implications. Sex was always dimmed by the dark shadow of guilt, sometimes enhancing the thrill but always keeping me within the boundaries of society’s values. In my twenties I explored emotions via primal therapy but sex was strictly excluded from the explorations. The early years in Poona in Rajneesh’s ashram were a wide field of sexual experiments for me, but as you say, I always wanted more than sexual pleasure – attention, affection, love, recognition, being part of a group, etc., etc. Only when I came across Actual Freedom, I came to understand that one has to remove one’s identity completely in order to enjoy sex for the pure sensuousness of it – ‘I’ will always feel abused and neglected when ‘I’ am not recognized with affection, love and gratitude.

Sex as a ‘tool towards enlightenment’ was a theory and/or practice so full of contradictions, hypocrisy and loopholes that in the end I could not make any sense of it anymore. As I said to No 8, investigating and enjoying sex as integral part of a journey towards purity and perfection was for me one of the first attractions of Actual Freedom.

I was asking what you meant by the phrase ‘rejection of emotional behaviour’ and suggested three possibilities. Are you saying that your method is ‘sitting it out without much ado about it’? Of course you can choose any method, the question is which one works. Does method ‘C’ work for you in that the emotion does not come back or are you sometimes faced with the same emotion (over the same cause) again and again?

I found that to effectively explore emotions to the point of eliminating them I had to experience them fully. Only by neither repressing, nor expressing, nor in any way rationally twisting the emotional experience could I meticulously observe, become fully aware of and sensibly contemplate on what is happening in my head, heart and guts and thus investigate the root cause of that particular emotion. Knowing that every emotion is part of the Human Condition relieved me from blaming myself or being resentful for having an emotion in the first place. In order to eliminate the particular emotion such that it would not return again and again, it was essential to explore it deeply at its core and to understand experientially how each emotion originated in my social identity and/or in my very sense of ‘being’. Once having seen the emotion in operation and understood its ramifications to their full extent there was no way I could feel the same way about a particular issue or situation – by having understood this specific piece of my identity it had been extinguished.

Needless to say, this method has not the slightest thing to do with plain rationalization or spiritual dis-identification – proven by the very fact that it works, that it gets rid of the emotion permanently while increasingly allowing the sensual sensuousness and the pure delight of being alive.

I know well the ‘occasional reluctance to explore’, yet the frustration of obviously going round in silly circles has always given me courage to stop wasting my time, to face the fear and ‘reluctance’ and do whatever was necessary to return to being happy and harmless.

Fair enough, you only go as far as you want as fast as you want. As long as you ‘seem happy’ then that seems to work. I simply suggested a way to explore further in case the option to ‘ stay out of the spell of any arising emotion’ is not enough for you.

Yes, ‘to use bare awareness and not be caught by the emotions’ is absolutely essential for becoming actually free from the Human Condition. Emotions, feelings and beliefs (passionate convictions) are how one sees one’s instinctual passions in operation. They form the layer of our social conditioning which needs to be explored and removed – both for a happy and harmless life in Virtual Freedom and for an experiential understanding of the raw instinctual passions at our very core. And you probably have experienced the instant gratifications when a belief disappears, an emotion doesn’t turn up anymore, a snide remark from someone else falls flat and as being alive becomes gradually a play and a pleasure.

This is great success, don’t you think? To have ‘brought the obstacle into focus’ and to know what the obstacle is about which keeps you in ‘stuckness’ is an excellent starting position for investigation. Now this obstacle can be identified, labelled and experientially explored, using apperceptiveness to detect its reasons, connections, source and implications. This has nothing to do with the Buddhist method (Vipassana) of labelling a feeling and then dis-identifying from it. 180 degrees opposite again. An actualist labels the feeling to get the bugger by the throat, to explore it as a scientist, to check out its silliness or sensibility, to determine how it is part of the Human Condition and then, when all is said and done, to permanently step out of having that emotion. This final stepping out often results in a pure consciousness experience.

Last night I was contemplating about Alan’s description of his ‘reflective contemplations’, ‘practising the actual’ and arriving here in the actual world and how this records with my experience. Further Alan says:

[Alan]: ‘Reflective contemplation’ is the way to not only get out of stuckness but also to discover what is preventing one experiencing this moment. I realised that this is what had occasioned all of my PCEs – this is what leads to wonder at the joy of it all. Alan to Vineeto, 29.4.2000

Recalling step by step my own process into a PCE last night I found that contemplation serves to focus on the direction – being happy, dismantling the self, comprehending enough of the real world in order to see the self in operation and to step out of it. Contemplation always helps to focus on and remove obstacles and then, with no feeling or belief interfering I can build up the sensuous awareness of this moment of being alive. The wind on the skin, the sounds around, the wiggling of my toe, visual delights, tastes and smells ... Increasing sensuousness tips over into gay abandon, the self as both the controller and the feeler are abandoned and bingo ... I am experiencing what I had previously only reflectively contemplated about – this moment of being alive as a flesh and blood body only.

The gay abandon can, of course, also happen without the reflective part, as a nature experience, in sex or any time when sensual pleasure is sensuous enough to tip over into the self-less experience of being alive as a flesh and blood body only.

Emotions are a slippery lot. They build the basis for our identity, which is as cunning as all get out. Yet the actualism method can be applied to discover every trick – whatever the feeling or emotion that keeps me from being happy here, now, needs to be examined and understood and then, presto, I go back to being happy again.

I find that emotions can wither for different reasons. Either I understand that it is silly to be emotional and make a deliberate choice to move on and ‘smell the coffee’ instead. Or the emotion has been investigated in detail and is just a leftover bad habit to be thrown out and then I can go back to enjoying the moment. If I have avoided an emotion it will for sure come back in a similar situation and thus give me another opportunity to notice it, feel it, face it, label it, explore it, understand it and step out of it.

So, the intellectual part asks questions about the nature of the programs. Some programs are completely obvious, others not so, and it’s difficult at times to differentiate between the elemental physical responses, and the learned reactions.

Yes, some programs are ‘completely obvious’, and at first it was far easier for me to observe them in other people. The trick, implicit in the actualism method, however was to search for the same programs in myself because the human condition is common to all and that includes ‘me’.

The ‘learned reactions’ are those that make up the social identity – my identity as a male or female, a member of a family, profession, peer group, nation, ethnic group, religion, political and ideological orientation. Each of these aspects of your social identity gives plenty of opportunities for ‘self’-investigation. By examining what is preventing you from being happy and harmless now you are successively questioning and challenging your ‘learned reactions’ and feelings that arise from being a social identity.

The elimination of one’s social identity requires the replacement of the moral and ethical arbitrary judgments of good and bad and right and wrong with an open-eyed evaluation and intelligent judgment based on what is sensible and what is silly. The beliefs and psittacisms one has been instilled with in childhood, or has later taken on as one’s own, need to be replaced with observable and verifiable facts.

The actualism method allows you to separate ‘elemental physical responses’ such as hunger, thirst, cold, heat, physical pain, discomfort and so on from your instinctual survival passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire. The more you investigate into your social identity and peel the layers of your beliefs and feelings associated with the ‘learned reactions’, the more those ‘elemental’ instinctual responses will come to the surface where they can be experienced and observed. To keep it simple and less confusing – first work first, and that is investigating the social identity.

When I looked up the word ‘grok’, the Oxford dictionary defined it as ‘understand intuitively or by empathy’. Spiritualism teaches that intuitive understanding is always ‘right’ and that intellectual understanding is at best incomplete, and mostly ‘wrong’. In actualism I learned to question my learned notions of right and wrong, good and bad and slowly replaced them with a common sense assessments of what is silly and what is sensible. Instead of intuition and gut feelings I looked for the unmistakable certainty of facts, which is far more accurate than any intuition can ever be.

But you are right that ‘what am I experiencing’ is indeed a different kettle of fish. Using the actualism method is a matter of intent – what is my aim, what do I want to achieve by questioning how I experience this moment? Sometimes I would get lost in following my affective experiences down the garden path, making them bigger and more intense the more I provided indulging attention. But whenever I remembered my goal to become free from malice and sorrow, my wandering observations changed into the search to find out how to get out of this insidious ‘self’-centredness of feeling-experiences and come back to being happy and the sensate experiencing of being alive. Unless you have an intent or reason for asking how am I experiencing this moment of being alive you will have neither the motivation to make it your first priority in life nor the impetus to overcome the reluctance to admit to unpleasant or undesirable answers.

The cute thing is that you don’t learn anything new but rather unlearn everything you’ve been told since the day you were born and then you even get to undo the genetic program of the instinctual survival passions. It is a fascinating journey, full of wonderful adventures, thrilling realizations and life-changing discoveries.

I like your analogy because it describes very well how one can experience oneself when applying the method of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ for some time, as belief after belief gives way to the irrefutable obviousness of facts and one ‘self’-image after the other crumbles in the bright light of sharpening self-awareness.

In the first months of my investigation I was thrilled and excited when I saw my beliefs tumbling, my morals thrown overboard and my ethical values gone out the window because they no longer made any sense. The challenge was to eliminate my social identity bit by bit, to question and examine my cherished beliefs, my ideas about right and wrong, good and bad and to shed my identity of belonging to a gender, a nationality, a profession, a race, a religious or spiritual group – in short everything that would give me definition, value and position as a member of society. Having looked again and again under the hood of the nice and the good girl that I usually was, I was at times shocked at what I discovered, as in ‘is that really ‘me’, is that who ‘I’ really am?’

However, some several months into my explorations, I remember a stage when I thought that I had done enough and cleaned up my remaining ‘self’ enough. Consequently, every time I experienced an emotion creeping up, I berated myself, resented that I still had feelings and wondered if I had missed a signpost and gone off the ‘right’ track. I had long discussions with Peter and Richard and read and re-read about the method of Actual Freedom until I had to admit that I had fallen into the trap of attempting to live as a ‘reduced self’, as much as possible devoid of feelings, and that this was the reason why I was feeling so stuck.

When I examined this attitude a bit closer, I found it to be a remnant of my past spiritual teachings – despite my initial genuine investigations I had inadvertently transmogrified the method of actualism into the Buddhist-based teachings of transcending or sublimating my feelings instead of eliminating the ‘self’ that generates them. This ‘escape route’ will inevitably present itself as a ‘self’-preserving way of sweeping the remaining ‘self’ and its resultant emotions and feelings ‘under the carpet’ in order to remain ‘me’. At this point the challenge was to see myself coming closer and closer to the point that cleaning myself up was not the whole story – that I was in fact undeniably moving to a point of no return. In hindsight, I can say that attempting to be a rational, sensible but emotion-reduced ‘self’ via sublimated feelings was jamming my foot on the breaks in order ‘to stay in existence’.

It took me many deep breaths to fully acknowledge that ‘I’ consist of nothing but my emotions and instinctual passions and that there won’t be any of ‘me’ left when all of the Human Condition in me is ‘cleaned up’. Or, to put it the other way round, it is impossible to clean myself up without simultaneously instigating my extinction. In actualism I am not merely sorting out and eliminating the good or bad attributes of ‘me’ – all of ‘me’ has to go. Once I fully comprehended the implications I could also see that there were only two options now – to abandon ship and turn back to ‘normal’ or to go full steam ahead and incite ‘my’ ‘self’-immolation. As I had already passed the point of no return because becoming ‘normal’ again was plain silly, I thought what the heck. By the way ... according to an American comedian, heck is a place not quite as bad as hell.

Well, ‘what the heck’ soon turned into more and more delicious abandon, and ever since I have been busy discovering how absolutely safe the actual world is – whenever ‘I’ have stepped aside to be able to experience its sensual abundance and utter perfection. The instinctual passions of survival are deeply ingrained in us and this is why, in order to be able to investigate those passions, the ‘dyke’ of one’s social identity along with one’s fixations of good and bad, right and wrong, has to leak and eventually break. As long as one feels it is ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ to feel fear, aggression, lust or dependency, there is no possibility of scientifically observing, factually examining, deeply understanding and successively diminishing one’s instinctual passions. Only when I know ‘me’ in all of my instinctual variations do I know all that I have to leave behind. As history has demonstrated very clearly, a blind jump from being ‘normal’ can only lead to ‘me’ changing identity by becoming ‘My Real Self’.

So, Gary, as you have discovered, actualism works successfully to ‘unwrap’, dismantle and eliminate what stands in the way of experiencing the actual – and as such the ‘Dutch boy’ may well be doomed to fail. I found, however, that I would never get more challenges than I could handle at one time, even if it sometimes initially felt that way. The trick is to remember not to take the discoveries of your emotions and beliefs as ‘leaks’ of an imperfect personality or as individual bad traits, but to understand them to be manifestations of our genetically inherited disease known as the Human Condition, i.e. common to all. The Human Condition by definition is common to all – however, each individual can instigate and facilitate their freedom only for himself and by himself.

When you see that everyone is inflicted with the same instinctual animal passions, then ‘my’ shame, ‘my’ guilt and ‘my’ doubt begin to lose their grip in the face of this obvious observable fact. Then one’s investigation changes from ‘what is wrong with my belief?’ to ‘this is a belief and where in particular is it wrong?’ That’s when investigating the Human Condition, as it is manifest in everyone and in oneself, becomes such a thrilling and intriguing adventure, so much so that one becomes fascinated, rather than seriously concerned, about how ‘I’ tick. Actualism is about being sincere, not serious – after all, leaving the Human Condition behind is considered a mental disorder.

Life is such a hoot!

I remember a stage when I thought that I had done enough and cleaned up my remaining ‘self’ enough. Consequently, every time I experienced an emotion creeping up, I berated myself, resented that I still had feelings and wondered if I had missed a signpost and gone off the ‘right’ track.

Yes, I still discern that there are times, recently in fact, that I deride myself for experiencing unpleasant emotional states. I think there is a tendency still to think that I am doing something ‘wrong’ and that I am ‘failing’ in my investigations into ‘me’. I am aware at times of the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ arising at these times, the result of a long period of socialization in which one has been schooled to conform to certain behaviours, attitudes, values and beliefs, according to one’s particular background, culture, gender, and other such socializing influences.

Whenever I have examined particular persistent feelings of ‘‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’’ I found that I had to investigate a layer deeper than purely questioning my particular socialization. I found that my fears of not meeting the ‘‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’’ were sometimes not only my own personal standards but were closely linked to my fear of losing friends, losing my image of who I thought I was, and again and again the atavistic fear of falling off the plate called humanity. The need to belong is a strong instinctual survival mechanism and not so long ago it was indeed almost impossible to survive on one’s own without the support of one’s tribe.

However, once I found that my particular feeling of not meeting my or other people’s standards was underscored by atavistic fears of being all on my own, it was relatively easy to stop focusing on ‘my’ individual failure or ‘my’ personal socialization and concentrate on examining this common-to-all instinctual passion. Then the reason for berating myself and blaming myself disappeared by itself – it is only natural that stepping out of humanity is causing fear – and it was at the same time clear beyond doubt that I would proceed despite the tremors.

*

I have a question at this point: Is living in the condition known as Virtual Freedom the same thing as being a ‘reduced self’, or is it different? What is behind my question is this: I can see where consciously striving to reduce one’s ‘self’ by the method of repressing or suppressing one’s emotions and feelings results in a condition of being a ‘stripped down self’, as Richard has put it. But then it seems that by continuous practicing of the method of actualism one is, in a sense, entering into a ‘self’-reduction plan, as one finds that one’s identity is getting rather threadbare, withering on the vine, so to speak, but yet not completely absent from the scene, as there are the inevitable ‘bleed-throughs’ of feelings. Do you see what I am getting at? If one is denying, controlling, suppressing, and repressing, that is not what we are talking about at all here. Because one is then still doing the controlling, whereas we are talking about eliminating the controller, the ‘me’ that is reining in the emotions. I think you are talking about this latter process of controlling or reining in the emotions through control, suppression, and selection.

I like your expression ‘entering into a ‘self’-reduction plan’ and I have always maintained that without substantially reducing the influence of the ‘self’ one cannot step out of one’s ‘self’ ... or, as Richard wrote to Alan recently –

‘the win-win aspect of actualism – as distinct from the all-or-nothing characteristic of spiritualism ...’

What is certainly being reduced to a microscopic size is one’s spiritual and social identity – one’s spiritual values, morals and ethics and one’s identity as a parent, as a member of a gender, a race, a nation, a profession or any social-ideological-spiritual-religious movement. When this outer layer of the ‘self’ has been fully examined, its influence successively disappears out of one’s life and life becomes increasingly ‘unrehearsed’ as there is no identity-image to be constantly polished, produced or maintained.

However, this social identity is only the outer layer of ‘me’, drilled into me from very early age in order to ensure the smooth operating of society. With diligence and awareness I reduce the influence of my social identity to a minimum so much so that life is experienced as a delight 99% of the time.

Then the ‘inevitable ‘bleed-throughs’ of feelings’ that you speak of can then be traced to our raw instinctual passions, the very core of the survival program. At this stage of the process I came to understand that the core of ‘me’ cannot be reduced, but the excesses of the instinctual passions fall by the wayside as the felicitous feelings increase. This is where my misunderstanding of attempting to live as a ‘reduced self’ lay, despite the fact that Richard had been very clear about the method of dealing with emotions all along –

Richard: The ‘good’ feelings – the affectionate and desirable emotions and passions (those that are loving and trusting) are minimised along with the ‘bad’ feelings – the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful) – so that one is freed-up to felicitously feel good, felicitously feel happy and felicitously feel excellent for 99% of the time. Richard, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, No 18

Ok, it sounds like what you are saying is that once the root is revealed and understood completely then it disappears. This does make sense to me. This answers my question clearly and completely. Thank you.

Given that you still seem to hold to the conclusion that ‘sorrow comes from fear’ you now jump to a further conclusion that once ‘the root is revealed and understood completely’ then fear ‘disappears’. You are therefore not concerned about eliminating what you call the ‘superficial emotions’ of malice and sorrow but that your sole aim in life is to become fearless. The aim of eliminating fear without aiming at eliminating one’s malice and sorrow is well-established in all the spiritual teachings – becoming fear-less by realizing ‘who you really are’, a process also known as Self-Realization. Thus one feels oneself to be all-powerful, i.e. fear-less, and is then no longer afraid of being malicious and sorrowful. The result of this transcendence can be observed in all the realized teachers who are known to pluck the heartstrings of sorrow in the name of feeling divine compassion and who unabashedly display their anger and displeasure from time to time, particularly when their disciples don’t ‘get it’ or fail to surrender.

The method of actualism aims at becoming aware of one’s beliefs and emotions and finding out the facts for oneself – I don’t wait for ‘the root’ to be ‘revealed’ to me by some Divine Intelligence but I actively search for the causes of malice in me and eliminate them one by one and I actively search for the causes of sorrow in me and root them out. In the course of becoming increasingly happy and harmless in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are, the instinctual fear of actually being here in the world-as-it-is, with people as-they-are, incrementally disappears on its own accord.

Maybe it will further clarify the difference between spiritualism and actualism by describing the process of examining a particular feeling – a process that, if thoroughly completed, can lead to the virtual elimination of that feeling together with that part of my identity who harboured and was nourished by this feeling. I will use sorrow as the example, given that the thread of our conversation initially started with the topic of exploring the causes of sorrow.

Whenever I experienced sorrow, the examination began right at the moment when I first became aware that I was experiencing the feeling of sorrow. Due to our social upbringing, every human being is taught to cope or deal with these undesirable feelings in very specific ways, amongst them being repressing one’s feelings, expressing them, accepting them or indulging in them in socially-acceptable ways, seeking solace and protection from some mythical God, Divine Intelligence or Divine Teacher or denying and transcending undesirable feelings by becoming a Higher Self.

Examples of this social programming are the spiritual belief that sorrow is good for me – therefore making feelings that are debilitating and devastating into something desirable, and the normal-world conviction that sorrow is part of human nature and you can’t change it – a fatalistic acceptance of all sorrowful feelings. We are taught a form of wishful thinking that by denying our feelings of sorrow they will somehow go away or at least not surface too often and men in particular are taught to believe that it is possible to think one’s way through sorrow and thereby rationalize it away. This socialization programming does have slight variations according to cultural conditioning, spiritual beliefs and gender, but all of this programming has a universal thread – it is solely designed to enable one to either cope with sorrow or, if that fails, to then dutifully follow the traditional religious/spiritual path of denial and transcendence.

The common thread of this socialization programming is to think that because fear is the most basic human emotion that one has only the two traditional choices – either make the best of being fearful in the real-world or seek to become fearless by following the spiritual path. To continue to believe this to be true means that one cuts oneself off from becoming aware of the fact that it is malice and sorrow and not fear that are the most salient emotions that characterize the human condition. This is where the discovery of actualism breaks entirely new ground because it does not pussyfoot around with denying the instinctual passions – it directly addresses those passions that prevent human beings living together in peace and harmony on this planet – malice and sorrow.

To theoretically think about and draw spurious conclusions about sorrow, i.e. ‘sorrow comes from fear’, only serves to bypass the first prerequisite of any investigation – the direct experience of the feeling itself – and one is therefore unable to become aware of what actually happens in the body and in the brain when one feels sorrow. Unless one personally observe right here, right now, the feeling while it is happening, it is not a scientific examination. The only way to find out what is fact and what is fiction, theory or speculation is to find out for oneself and conduct one’s own hands-on scientific investigation.

So when you find that what you understand to be the root of a feeling does not result in the elimination of that feeling, then you might have to go back to the ‘outer layers’ and investigate the traditional beliefs, values and conclusions that you are unwittingly taking for granted. Unless you question everything – and find a definite unambiguous factual answer to each of your questions – there is no way of ever experientially understanding the root of an emotion, let alone an instinctual passion.

Okay, this is where it is useful to make a clear distinction between one’s social conditioning of needing to be perfect according to some set of social rules or standards and one’s pure intent to become happy and harmless.

By becoming an actualist you set becoming happy and harmless as your aim in life and by doing so you set your own standards of what you want to achieve. These standards are far beyond the normal moral and ethical values of what society considers being ‘good’ or ‘right’. Social standards are variable, what is good for one social or spiritual group is bad for another, what is right for one group is wrong for another, what is perfect for some is flawed for others, what is true for some is false for others. Not only do these standards vary from group to group, but they are also subject to vagaries – what is deemed to be socially appropriate behaviour changes cyclically according to cultural fashions and whims. The variations and vagaries of social standards are the cause of so many differences of opinion, debates, arguments, conflicts, public machinations and self-flagellations that it is a wonder these standards have any credibility left at all.

It goes without saying that the aim of becoming happy and harmless is not reached in a day or a month but that it takes a pioneering attitude, stubborn determination and diligent application to find your way through the maze of your social conditioning and your instinctual programming and all the emotional confusion that this process entails.

*

I remember you saying that when you started AF, that you often felt like a ‘tiger in a cage’. Maybe that’s how you felt – I prefer not to make myself feel that way – I prefer to find my own pace and put happiness as priority.

Yes, in the beginning of taking up actualism I ‘often felt like a tiger in a cage’, but it was a cage entirely of my own making in that I had made it my aim not to let out my feelings on anyone else. <snip> If you ‘prefer not to make myself feel that way’ that is fair enough. It is not everyone’s cup of tea to be a pioneer in radically breaking with the social-spiritual traditions and going against the animal-instinctual imperative by putting one’s harmlessness first.

‘The most appropriate and effective way of putting [this aim] into practice’ is to ask yourself each moment again ‘How am I experience this moment of being alive?’ And when you investigate what exactly it is each moment that prevents you from being happy and harmless, you encounter the various obstacles on the path, one of them being, as you indicated above, that you ‘castigate’ yourself for not being perfect.

Blaming yourself for not being perfect according to other people’s standards is, however, the quintessence of your social identity, the ‘noisy chap in the head’ as Gary named ‘him’. This inner critic is the social part of the entity inside the flesh-and-blood body called No 37 – ‘he’ who has imbibed all the rules and regulations as to how to be a fit member of society, fulfilling and expressing what is ‘right’ and ‘good’, avoiding and suppressing what is ‘wrong’ and ‘bad’.

By using the method of actualism, I dissected those social rules, ethical values and moral standards one by one, examining them to see if they were silly or sensible in accordance of my own chosen aim of becoming unconditionally happy and unconditionally harmless.

*

In my experience, only by becoming Happy first – can I also become Harmless. This is not to neglect Harmlessness, rather to notice that if I try to be to vigilant – ‘taking responsibility’ for how my emotions cause ripples in other people, then I become a ‘tiger in a cage’ – i.e., unhappy. Granted, both happiness are harmlessness depend on each other, but happiness seems to be the horse carrying the harmlessness cart – and not the other way around. I don’t have motivation to be harmless, if I’m not happy. At least – that’s my experience.

If by ‘becoming Happy first’ one could ‘also become Harmless’, the whole world would be happy and harmless by now. The pursuit of happiness is as old as humankind but it still has not produced anything remotely resembling harmlessness, let alone harmony. Actualism breaks with the instinctual compulsion of human beings to put their own happiness first and put harmlessness second – as a socially conditioned afterthought, so to speak. As long as I put my happiness above being harmless, my outlook towards others is inevitably ‘self’-centred, which means that I cannot consider others as equitable fellow human beings.

The challenge in actualism is to resist the temptation to compromise your aim and your pure intent when you are not perfect at the first attempt, but instead investigate the ‘little man in the head’ who is doing the castigating. Given that the inner critic is your social identity, ‘he’ is nothing other than the conglomerate of all the beliefs, morals, ethics, values, principles and psittacisms that ‘he’ has been programmed with since birth. Your social identity also determines how you automatically relate to other people and how you expect and demand other people to perceive you. In order to eliminate one’s social identity one needs to replace the moral and ethical arbitrary judgments of good and bad and right and wrong with an open-eyed evaluation and intelligent judgment based on what is sensible and what is silly. One also needs to replace the beliefs and psittacisms one has been instilled with in childhood, or has later chosen as one’s own, with observable and verifiable facts.

By choosing to become happy and harmless I set my goal far higher than the societal values of ‘right’ and ‘good’ and, as such, the nagging ‘little woman in the head’ eventually ran out of objections of me being happy and harmless. It is the intent to be harmless that is the crucial difference between a spiritualist and an actualist because everyone wants to be happy but very few are ready to commit themselves to the truly altruistic aim of becoming harmless.

There were two aspects that I found with the need to achieve. One was the social conditioning of needing to be someone, earning my right to be here, proving my worth and being a useful member of society. Very early on I decided that the path of family and career wasn’t for me, so I went off trying to achieve something in the spiritual world, but the pressure to achieve something stayed the same. When I began to explore the feeling of boredom, and the need to be busy, however, I discovered another layer under the social aspects of the desire to achieve. ‘My’ very existence depends on ‘me’ being busy because without a mission and a meaning in life ‘I’ am superfluous, i.e. ‘I’ have no business in being here.

The solution for me was to make becoming free from the human condition my mission in life – this is what I want to achieve and this is what gives my life meaning and significance. The cute thing is that with this mission ‘I’ am writing ‘my’ own death warrant. Now I understand the feeling of boredom as ‘me’ objecting to being redundant and when I agree to becoming redundant, everything is experienced as delicious and fascinating, whether doing something or doing nothing.

As for eliminating instincts, I found that the method works as effectively for discovering, experiencing, investigating and eliminating instincts as it does for investigating the beliefs, morals, ethics and values that shape our social identity. Personally, I had to get rid of my moral, ethical and spiritual restrictions first in order to be able to admit to, acknowledge and recognize the ‘gross’ instinctual passions that lie at the core of my ‘self’. First I had to question my ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, before I was able to recognize and investigate my own raw survival instincts of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.

Having been programmed first with the Christian and later with Eastern religious belief, the fact that humans are born with a set of instincts – and not born ‘innocent’ – has been quite a new discovery for me. Christians say that one is born with original sin because of Adam’s disobedience, and in a way they come close to the fact that without moral and ethical restraint, we humans behave no differently than wild animals, instinctually driven.

Slowly, slowly, after I removed the layers of moralistic and ethical values I could dare to acknowledge and experientially discover that ‘me’, at the very core, consists of nothing else but crude and cruel survival instincts – fear, aggression, nurture and desire. Discovering and seeing in action each of these instincts was an adventure by itself, thrilling, fascinating and very revealing into the human nature.

First one removes the ‘truths’, convictions, intuitions and feelings that were instilled in us to make us a fit member of society – a man, a woman, a wife, a husband, a scientist, a clerk, an American, a follower or a ‘true’ believer. And it is great fun to dismantle those identities and eventually become an anonymous nobody. Then, on honest investigation, you will be able to recognize these instinctual passions as ‘you’, all of ‘you’. It is not a matter of having an ‘intimate’ relationship with one’s instincts, but to acknowledge, feel and experience that ‘I’ am my instinctual passions, nothing else. ‘I’ am rotten to the very core.

That experiential acknowledgment that underlying one’s precious feelings are the animal instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire, gives one the motivation and pure intent to actively devote one’s life to irrevocably changing oneself.

In order to get closer to one’s avowed aim, the living of a PCE for 24 hours a day, one then has to get off one’s bum and dismantle who one thinks and feels one is. The change that needs to happen can only happen in the social identity, in one’s own Human Condition. The only thing ‘I’ can do is actively diminish ‘me’ – examining and investigating my social and spiritual conditioning and my set of survival instincts – all my passionate beliefs and my affective imaginations. So when I get confused, or impatient, or fearful, or greedy for more PCEs or discouraged, or, or, or ... this is where I have to look, this is where I can change something. This is where ‘I’ can speed up ‘my’ demise. When I am emotional, slightly off-track or very disturbed, I am the ‘me’, my identity – and I can only do something about this identity. That means, ‘I who I think and feel I am’ is the thing that needs to be taken apart, the thing that needs my full attention, pure intent and concentration. My social identity and my instinctual passions are the only thing I can do something about, because that is ‘me’, obstructing and preventing the perfection that is already here from becoming apparent. In that sense the actual me, what I am, doesn’t really get bigger, ‘what I am’ only becomes more and more apparent.

There is no point in waiting for the ‘Grace of Existence’ to descend and deliver a PCE. When all is said and done, waiting for a PCE derives from a grim-world view where one doesn’t want to be here but wants to go somewhere else – into a PCE. There is nothing I can do about the actual me – ‘what I am’ is already perfect, it is already as it should be. But I can actively do something about the obstacles that prevent me from experiencing the actual world; I can remove, slowly and meticulously, the stuff that the identity consists of. I can investigate into each belief, each hope, faith and ‘truth’, examine experientially each feeling and emotion that is triggered by people or situations, until I finally uncover the bare animal instincts. By that time the social identity and the instinctual passions have become rather thin and transparent so that ‘what I am’ can be more and more clearly experienced.

On the path to Actual Freedom the ‘bad news’ is that I have to get off my bum, investigate every idea and imagination, every dream, hope and faith as much as every bout of anger, impatience, complaint, fear, love and compassion. It is the opposite of meditation because I actively pursue every obstacle to being happy now, here, and for that I use my capacity to think, contemplate, reflect, judge and investigate in order to find and eliminate the Human Condition in me, bit by bit.

The ‘good news’ is that there is nobody who can speed up or prevent my progress on the path to Actual Freedom except myself – it is all in my own hands. I am my own judge whether I am happy or not, honest or not, free of particular beliefs and morals or not. Nobody is interfering with this process and nobody can. And it is a journey of a lifetime – with imminent and incrementally increasing rewards of more and more freedom from bondage, malice and sorrow.

The new thing, that I found in Richard’s discovery, is a questioning of everything that is not actual – not experience-able through the physical senses. This includes everything – good and bad – that human beings believe and ‘feel’ about being on earth. The important words are ‘believe’ and ‘feel’. Everything that we human beings have made up in our minds, in head or heart, is part of the particular identity of each of us. For instance: I have been a German, a woman, a secretary, a restaurant-owner, a Sannyasin, a drug-counsellor, a girlfriend, a lover, an Australian resident – all those emotional identities were the ‘who’ I thought and felt I was. Those roles and identities made me different to and separate from everyone around me who had different feelings, different beliefs, different emotional experiences or emotional memories. Further I discovered that I was driven by instincts – our animal heritage from the days of sheer survival – that all humans are equipped with from birth. They all form what we call ‘self’.

In the end, when I look around, it is exactly those different, passionate defended roles, beliefs and emotions that are causing both religious and territorial / tribal wars in the world. No religion or philosophy has ever, or will ever, succeed in bringing a lasting solution to wars, rapes, murder, suicide, depression, fear etc. Although using different methods, both Eastern and Western religions tell us to ‘go somewhere else’ in our imagination, into some inner space or some hoped for heaven after death.

The new approach is to get rid of this entity inside the physical body, which is more or less the same for every human being, and have paradise here on earth, while we are alive. I cleaned myself of the alien entity inside that feels, worries, is hurt, is hopeful, is loved or unloved, feels connected or an outsider, is angry, is anxious, excited or bored. An identity that continuously wants to make sense of questions like ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what happens after death’?

Recognising beliefs and emotions as just that, as ideas and feelings and not an actual part of my physical body and thus non-essential to living as a sensate and reflective body, I slowly slowly discarded every single one of them as redundant. It is a continuous psychic operation, shaking the very ground I thought I was standing on, but it is like removing a cancer that has made life hard, fearful, miserable or ‘otherworldly’.

This process is like taking the skin-tight suit off to feel the air on the skin for the first time, smell a flower for the first time without an interpretation of good or bad, to hear the rain falling on the leaves for the first time in this moment in time. Just the senses, and the delight of being aware of it. Any meaning, any goal, any moral or ethical judgement would stand in the way of this direct sensate intimacy. Simply being a human being, enjoying every moment of life, without malice, without sorrow – without an identity that would feel and act on those emotions.

The end-result is that one lives on this earth, in this moment, utterly carefree, able to apply intelligence wherever needed, fully enjoying the sensual delights and pleasures, and is much more innocent than a new-born child.

Not only hopes disappeared but also the ‘hoper’, not only feeling insulted disappeared but also the ‘feeler’ along with an ‘insulter’. The whole factory of emotions and imaginations (believing) has gone up in smoke. A wonderful liberation. A final arrival. I had searched all my life, but always in the wrong direction, away from life, away from earth, away from the physical. In a big loop I now come back to my senses, literally and figuratively.