Roy: Life is already pretty great as it is. But there are times that something happens, and it’s apparent that if I was free from this natural and social conditioning, it would have been different — specially for others: the experience of others you be better if I didn’t behave the way I behaved. That part, being “harmless” is as appealing to me, as being “happy” at this point, I think. (link)
Hi Roy,
I like what you wrote here – I remember ‘Vineeto’ writing about how ‘she’ discovered that feeling harmless was not enough, ‘she’ recognized that ‘she’ wanted to be harmless, not just feel harmless.
VINEETO: 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. (…)
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.
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. (Actualism, Vineeto, AF List, Tarin, 13.8.2006)
Roy: By being harmless you are already helping everyone without being altruistic in the traditional sense. You are harmless if you manage to deconstruct your biological and social conditioning. Once you understand those you realize when you judge people and why you are judging them, when you are mean and why you are being mean, etc… (link)
Yes, being harmless is doubly beneficial, it reduces/ eliminates your harmful actions and simultaneous reduces your harmful vibes which are often more powerfully harmful than the words or actions themselves.
As for “when you judge people” – ‘thou shalt not judge’ is both a Christian adage and common in Eastern spiritual teachings but doesn’t hold up in real life. Judging, i.e. to make appraisals is a necessity in everyday life – the values by which to judge, however, can be harmful or beneficial. Judging both yourself and other by the (conditioned) rules of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad is following the values passed on from long-dead people or God(s) as the ultimate arbiters. Judgement according to sensible and silly, however, is indispensable.
RICHARD: Shall I put it this way (about not being judgmental)? Do you personally:
• Condone rape and child abuse?
• Approve of rape and child abuse?
• Have no opinion about rape and child abuse?
• Disapprove of rape and child abuse?
• Proscribe rape and child abuse?
Is it not simply a fact that one makes appraisals of situations and circumstances each moment again in one’s daily life … this judging is called making a decision regarding personal and communal salubrity. (Richard, List B, No. 42, 12 Nov 2000).
Often such judgements (based on being silly or sensible) can be current appraisals of people or situations, which can change when new facts emerge.
However, when you discover that you were “mean” then your ‘assessment’ was based on your feeling anger, defensiveness, feeling insulted, righteous, hurt, etc., and you can then investigate the underlying feeling.
Roy: For example today I saw a woman with revealing clothes and immediately I became angry. It’s an automatic feeling (which is interesting because I used to think that it started with thoughts). The difference now from before is that I realize what’s going on with me and the feeling stops quickly. (link)
This a good example of a feeling reaction based on a certain conditioned value of ‘thou shalt not wear revealing clothes if you are a female’. Even though the feeling stopped quickly for you it would be interesting to contemplate if the conditioning which set up this ‘rule’ stands in the way of being happy and harmless – just so that it won’t offend you next time it happens.
‘Vineeto’ also discovered in ‘her’ quest of becoming factually/ actually harmless, that it wasn’t enough to investigate and disempower the ‘bad’ emotions and their related conditioning but even more so the ‘good’ emotions. Each ‘good’ feeling has a dark twin underpinning it.
Here is how Richard described how during his enlightenment ‘he’ examined the ‘good’ and particularly the ‘Good’ and given that is was so revered in all societies, it was a mammoth task –
Richard: For eleven years I lived in an Altered State Of Consciousness, so I had plenty of time to examine all its nooks and crannies … and I found much that was murky and dirty lurking around in the outer darkness. (…) I soon found enough to make me start suspecting something very serious was wrong with Spiritual Enlightenment. To start off with was the inescapable fact that I had a ‘Sense Of Mission’ to bring ‘Peace and Love’ to a suffering humanity – I was driven to spread ‘The Word’ and to disseminate ‘The Truth’ – and this imposition did not sit well with me. In my fourth year I started to question the efficacy of Divine Compassion as a means of resolving sorrow once and for all. As a palliative for suffering it was beyond compare – it superseded pity, sympathy and empathy by a mile – but it remained forever a panacea only. Consolation for sorrow, no matter how divine that solace may be, is not a cure that lasts.
In my sixth year I was ready to examine Love Agapé – which up until then had been far to sacred to put under the microscope – and I soon found enough to warrant further investigation. If Divine Compassion had been found to be murky and dirty, I was to go on to discover that Love Agapé was sordid and squalid to the extreme. Just as compassion has its roots in sorrow, so too has love its origin in malice. Hatred is the essential companion to love; the one cannot exist without the other. When I first saw the other face of love I was horrified … for I was in the grip of a ‘Demonic Power’ disguised as ‘Divine Authority’. The diabolical is but the essential sub-stratum for the righteous; the sinister for the good; the fiendish for the glorious; the infernal for the heavenly; the wicked for the charitable … and so on. Love Agapé – which has been touted as the cure-all for the ills of humankind for thousands of years – was hand-in-glove with evil. No wonder that religious wars have beset this planet for aeons, for the central tenet of any religious or spiritual path is love … and love is the very element that will sabotage any well-meant endeavour with its secret agenda. A loving self is still a self, nevertheless. And a self is made out of the sorrow and malice that are generated by the instinctual aggression and fear that humans are born with in order for the species to survive. (…)
In my tenth year I tentatively approached one of the last bastions of spiritual enlightenment: pacifism. Almost all of the other attributes of what I called an ‘Absolute Freedom’ had been stripped away and if I was to undo what is called ‘ahimsa’ in the east – non-violence – then there would not be much left of my precious ‘Peace On Earth’ that I was charged to bring. I found a strong resistance within myself to contemplate letting go of the scriptural adage: ‘Turn the other cheek’ … even though I intellectually considered it to be nonsense. If an entire country held such a belief it would be akin to hanging out a sign saying: ‘Please feel free to invade, we will not fight back’. Also, I personally relied upon the police to protect me and mine from any personal attack or robbery – what if they adopted this principle? By the time I had worked my way through this philosophical dilemma I had to turn my sights upon the last thing that stood between me and an actual freedom. I would have to let go of the deeply ingrained concept of ‘The Good’. For this to happen I would have to eliminate ‘The Bad’ in me, or else I would be likely to go off the rails and run amok. Little did I realise that it was ‘The Good’ that kept ‘The Bad’ in place. I was soon to find this out. (Richard, List B, No. 31, 7 Mar 1998).
Cheers Vineeto