Hope

RICHARD: To ‘trust’ someone – anyone at all – is to invite betrayal … to ‘trust’ someone is to impose a demand upon them that they may not be able to live up to (or want to) and I never do that. I have had no use for ‘trust’ at all: to ‘trust’ is to attract deception. Etymologically, ‘trust’ – a covenant with ‘The Truth’ – is in the same category as faith – loyalty to ‘The Truth’ – and both are aligned with belief. Belief means fervently wishing to be true. There is not much difference between ‘trust’ and faith … as a generalisation perhaps ‘trust’ is used more in spiritual circles, whereas faith is more aligned with the religious. ‘Trust’ seems to have more solid connotations than faith – to the spiritual aspirant, who scorns religion and all its trappings – yet, essentially they amount to the same. They all give rise to hope. Hope, the antidote to despair, is what most people live on. Living in hope – having faith or trusting – is a poor substitute for the living purity of the perfection of the actual. Hope sets one up for disappointment time and again … and all it is, is the antidote for despair. All trusting, believing, hoping and having faith and certitude are but the antidotes to distrust, disbelief, despair, doubt or suspicion.

VINEETO: I am asking because when I investigated my expectations and desires that I knew by past experience would inevitably lead to disappointment and sorrow, I was then able to chuck both my expectation and disappointment, both my desire and sorrow out the window. And once I stopped doing what caused me to feel sorrowful, then the fear of this sorrow re-occurring also disappeared. Given that my aim was to become free of malice and sorrow, it became obvious to me that I also had to become free from the dreams, hopes, desires and greed that were the cause of my sorrow.

However, once embarked upon the ‘wide and wondrous path’, you are not on your own: the perfection of the infinitude of this physical universe is with you all the way … but if you waver, you are indeed on your own. It is a matter of having the courage of your convictions and letting nothing stand in your way; determination and perseverance are the essential prerequisites to ensure success … coupled with application and diligence. Having the ‘courage of your convictions’ has nothing to do with believing, trusting, hoping or having faith that it be possible. I, for one, never believed, trusted, hoped or had faith that it was possible, for such an action of believing, trusting, hoping and having faith perpetuates the believer, the truster, the hoper and the faithful. On the contrary, I could no longer believe that it was not possible – which is a different action entirely to believing, trusting, hoping and having faith that it is possible – thus dispensing with the believer, the truster, the hoper and the faithful. Do you see this?

The search for meaning amidst the debris of the much-vaunted human hopes and dreams and schemes has come to its timely end. With the end of both ‘I’ and ‘me’, the distance or separation between both ‘I’ and ‘me’ and these sense organs – and thus the external world – disappears. To be living as the senses is to live a clear awareness in operation … which is known as Apperception, a pure consciousness experience of the world as-it-is. —A Précis Of Actual Freedom

Editor’s note: I identified a hitherto-unconscious pattern of human affective behaviour that involves some sort of ‘building up of’ one’s identity, via hopes, dreams and schemes. The pattern, which I call “identity building”, becomes particularly obvious when the structure being tacitly propped up over a lifetime suddenly comes crumbling down upon life’s various set backs, which misfortune to an actualist is in fact a blessing in disguise to proceed to, as Peter says, “actively demolish and break [it] down” via, instead, allowing oneself to Being the doing of what is happening.

RICHARD: Gratitude is one of the many ploys designed, by those who expound on the merits of self-imposed suffering, to keep one in servile ignominy and creeping despair. As strange as it may initially seem, gratitude has the same deleterious effect upon one’s well-being as the resentment it seeks to reform. When gratitude is realised as being the panacea that it is, one will gladly renounce it along with the resentment it promises to replace. To successfully dispense with the despised resentment, its companion emotion, the extolled gratitude, must also go. It is a popular misconception that one can do away with a ‘bad’ emotion whilst hanging on to the ‘good’ one. In actualism the third alternative always applies. ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’, ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’, ‘Virtue’ and ‘Sin’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Despair’, ‘Gratitude’ and ‘Resentment’, and so on, all disappear in the perfection of purity. Purity is the hall-mark of the stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe … which is the life-giving foundation of all that is apparent. Unless the factuality of the existence of the third alternative is firmly grasped, one is forever fated to shuttle back and forth between the opposites. Gratitude simply does not work for it draws its energy from resentment itself … and from nowhere else. Gratitude feeds off resentment – one cannot be grateful unless one is first resentful – and one cannot maintain any emotion without retaining its opposite. Neither does one adopt that other stratagem: transcendence. Transcendence is a form of sublimation … to transcend is to confirm and endorse the reality of the opposites. One disposes of all these pathetic methods very simply: By being here now as this flesh and blood body.

RESPONDENT: For me, while it is easy (comparatively) to label and handle obvious feelings like anger, malice, compassion, hope, I find it more difficult to label not-so-apparent feelings. These feelings create a neither-happy-nor-sad kind of state. I remember you talked of dullness in one of your mails. But I find that this dullness or boredom is not the same every time it happens and it happens very frequently.

RICHARD: Okay. It is essential for success to grasp the fact that this is your only moment of being alive. The past, although it did happen, is not actual now. The future, though it will happen, is not actual now. Only now is actual. Yesterday’s happiness does not mean a thing if one is miserable now … and a hoped-for happiness tomorrow is to but waste this moment of being alive in waiting. All you get by waiting is more waiting.