Richard, would humanity sans instinctual passions still have the inclination and ability to maintain a technologically advanced civilisation?

If there is no psychic entity in your body than you don’t know and don’t care what will happen next moment. So, your experience is always fresh and no boredom or fear is possible. And because there is no ‘I’ in you, there is nobody to worry about anything or correct, improve anything? So, the world is perfect.

And what are your views regarding relationships and what people call ‘love’? Do you think it’s possible for two identity-less beings to fall in love with each other?

Yes, Richard, if people lived by the ‘feelings’ in their hearts, souls, the feeling of love for all creatures and the environment, we might not be in the mess we are today. But people have hardened to their true feelings – their feelings of everything.

Richard, in reading your recent contributions to this list, such as the example above, I am beginning to question whether you and I use certain words, such as ‘emotions’ in the same way. For it seems that perhaps I use that word in a more inclusive sense of which your use is a subset. Perhaps your use is more restrictive / precise. For example when you express that communicating via the internet is great ‘fun’ – I equate fun to have an emotional component. If joy and fun are non-emotional, they also are not machine like nor dead. What do you call that vivifying facet of each breathtaking moment if not emotional?

Let me ask you this, Richard. Suppose one day that you visit your wife in the expectation of a little mutual pleasure. You arrive there, but instead of your wife assenting to some harmless hanky-panky, she instead tells you that she doesn’t want to see you any more because she has finally worked out that you are a fraud. She says that she had been blindly following you all these years, but now realises the error of her ways and doesn’t want to participate any longer in the sham. What do you think, Richard? Furthermore, she also tells you that she is about to go off on an overseas holiday with her new boyfriend and won’t be back in the country for a month. Would you feel no emotions at all in this scenario?

Richard, I have been reading your correspondence on your website. The actual freedom issue has been on my mind. Sometimes on the back burner, sometimes on the front burner – but it has been there. I am investigating my life vigorously as some major changes seem to be lurking around the corner. I think that, amazing as it is (quite against the odds?), a feeling-less life could be actually perfect!

I have two parrots in a cage home, and I see them flirting and playing. You said that you are not able for flirting but able for sex. I can’t understand that. I really can’t. Why you have a companion and you don’t change one every day? You don’t have any feelings for her, so what a difference makes?

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. I cannot say that there are absolutely no connections to others, as it is obvious to me in my relationship with my partner that a sense of connectedness comes up from time to time in various ways. And no doubt this happens with other people as well. However, I have noticed for a long period that when people want to be ‘friends’ with me, for instance, and make certain friendly overtures, these are generally not at all reciprocated on my part. In other words, the offer to ‘make a friend’ or ‘be a friend’ or such similar things as happen in the social world usually fall completely flat on my part. I have sometimes gotten the impression, gleaned from body language and other cues, that this irritates people. Overtures of this type just do not seem to ‘take’ with me. It is difficult to describe but I am sure that the other practiced Actualists on this list know what I am talking about.

And want to know why you do anything at all if you aren’t motivated by the pleasure/ pain cycle. How is this body motivated to do anything at all if there is no feeling?