Richard: To say that I was amazed rather fails to adequately describe the feeling of relief that after all there was a solution to the human situation here on earth. I was ecstatic.
That proved to be my undoing – as far as actual freedom is concerned. Ecstasy led to euphoria and euphoria led to bliss. In the blissful state I manifested and became Love Agapé which led to an emanation of Divine Compassion for all living beings" emphasis added.
It’s is interesting to consider that “love and compassion” mean different things to people.
It’s another spectrum. For some it is the gooey sentimentality of puppies, whilst for others it’s the intense desire for world peace.
Quite obviously, Richard was on the world peace end of the spectrum.
It’s also interesting that in this description, it was the ecstasy he points to as as his “undoing”.
Which makes so much more sense than “love and compassion” per se.
It lines up perfectly with what I saw sitting on a bench contemplating what I called “primal distress” morphing into libido. How one’s desire to be safe as one experienced in the womb, is recycled by blind nature into the desire to unite with another.
The point of departure is pleasure.
As Grace pointed out on her scale, there is a point in physical intimacy where the experience “forks”. On one hand there is the path of “love” , the other “direct sensual pleasure”.
Enjoying and appreciating is to choose the “direct sensual pleasure” route.
Super interesting Rick. Impressive research too. Makes me wonder if Richard then followed a sort of hybrid approach to go out-from-control - perhaps not 180 degrees but more like 90 degrees Yes, perhaps it did the trick enough in terms of allowing him to go of malice and sorrow, but eventually was a bit of a time bomb as it pushed him into enlightenment.
From my memory he leaves enlightenment the same way he came in, through love. Specifically when Devika asks him if he could love one woman rather than the world.
Vineeto talks about a parallel between this and her experience of actual freedom here. Back in the day I couldn’t really understand the parallel.
"The final clue was again about caring, a caring as close to an actual caring as an identity can muster. Only when I cared enough to give all of ‘me’ to another person, to give them what they want most, was I then ready to give it to the one I cared for most, the one I was closest to, and then I was able to leave all remnant concerns and inhibitions of my identity behind.
Those who are concerned that my report be consistent with Richard’s process of becoming free might consider that Richard gave all of ‘himself’, an enlightened Being at the time, to Devika. She had challenged him to, instead of loving All, to instead love one person only and Richard took the challenge. He cared enough to dare – he fell in love with Devika and gave her all of ‘himself’. That total commitment proved to be the beginning of the end of ‘him’."
Reading it now, I’m still not really sure I quite get it hahaha. I see the logic, but I wonder if the comparison is being stretched a bit too far. Wonder what she would say about this now. Should have asked her when I saw her but it wasn’t on my mind.
Maybe present discussion can shed some light on this though. Perhaps an actualist can extract something useful from love - the ‘giving oneself’ bit. Imagine a venn diagram with intersecting circles, one with love and another with near actual caring. Maybe the shaded bit in the centre is what they have in common. You would then think that both someone who has not known love at all as well as someone prizes love too much e.g. the romantic or love addict - would be at a disadvantage with regards to self-immolation as they would struggle to reach that ‘giving oneself’ stage.
Then she also says this which I can fully appreciate:
“The key component for both of us had been caring, a caring as close to an actual caring as an identity can muster.”
“To put it in context of my own experiences: Over the years I increasingly allowed myself to dare to care for my fellow human beings, and gave up dissociating, rationalizing and turning away from the plight of humanity, something which I had practiced as a kind of ‘self’-defence during my spiritual years. I instead gave myself permission to become acutely aware of their pain and suffering, which was also ‘my’ pain and suffering. This in turn increased the urgency to do something about the human condition in myself in order to set others free from my suffering and animosity with the added intention that after becoming actually free I would be able to show by example how others who are interested could do it for themselves.”
My experience was similar. I wasn’t much of a spiritualist, but I think actualists can have a blind spot with regards to caring too. As an actualist I thought of anything in the empathic, caring territory as being akin to garlic for a vampire and ran the hell away from it! I had to soften and start to feel something for others, but knew that love was a dead end - there was somewhere else this needed to be taken … into biological atruism territory that is.
The way I see it is that it’s not via love per se, or love in and of itself that helps per se.
Rather it’s that as a feeling-being , the natural way for me to care about something is affection and love etc. So for ‘me’ to care - inevitably , at first , it will be affectionately so.
The key as an actualist is to see that these affectionate feelings per se don’t do the job thoroughly enough of caring and being considerate. They are a flawed way to care. So if you actually do care , as an actualist … you naturally ‘discard’ them for what is better. And by that I mean you don’t stop caring but rather you see that you are able to care more when being felicitous , in an EE , eventually a PCE etc.
But if you avoid love then basically you avoid caring and you never get to that point. I suppose it’s theoretically possible for someone to skip over that affectionate feeling phase but I haven’t heard of it happening yet.
In Richard’s case since there was no precedent to tell him otherwise, he fully went the loving and compassionate route and it turned into love and compassion for humanity and then to full blown Enlightenment. But this full blown Love Agape wasn’t actually caring for humanity or for anyone in particular. It was too far up one’s bumhole . So the challenge to love just one person brought him back to daring to care which led to unraveling the whole thing (by seeing that love itself doesn’t deliver the full goods of caring as much as possible).
Good timing, I was just thinking about all this yesterday and couldn’t really come to any conclusion.
It seems like this area of caring is a bit of a mine-field! I was thinking yesterday how usually when we start to think about altruistic self immolation - how it can turn into some kinda moral dilemma of ‘will I be a good enough actualist to sacrifice myself for others’. I was thinking about how this gets turned into the principle of ‘putting the other before oneself’ so basically ‘I’ suffer so that others can be happy - then I realised that it cannot go this way, this route cannot eradicate the human condition in toto because it requires a martyr to keep suffering for others.
There must be something that is by its nature applicable to all - to this body, that body and everybody. Which seems to be this near actual caring. But then these lines of enquiry begin to pop up :
Do ‘I’ strive to cultivate this near-actual caring?
If ‘I’ do try to cultivate it, would such caring be genuine? Or would it be a means to an end, a way to get ‘my’ reward? (An action which would actually keep ‘me’ in place)
Related to the last one, where does the line exist between morality and near actual caring (I have a sense that it is the connection to pure intent that differentiates the 2)
How do I ensure that this caring (which for a feeing being must be affective) does not veer off into getting tangled up deeper in ‘humanity’ and thus ‘I’ remain in place. Again I can see that it is pure intent which guides in the correct direction.
So it’s like experientially I have a sense of a direction that I must travel in - it cannot turn into morality, it cannot turn into the messy side of caring. It has to be a caring for one and for all and it has to be a caring motivated by the thing which shows a genuine way out - pure intent. But right now it’s a little bit of a mess with all these questions kinda floating about and not quite fitting in!
I am also trying to pin point the thing which is complicating things here for me and I can’t quite formulate it. It’s like whichever way I go it circles back to me
As in I want to live that which the PCE demonstrates and yet ‘I’ can not do it for ‘me’.
On the other hand though if I try to flip this around and do it for others it seems to be a little trick that ‘I’ do to get ‘my’ reward (basically morality), so it is not a genuine caring.
I do remember what it is like in a PCE, there is an actual caring which is intrinsic to being here as a flesh and blood body. ‘I’ can somewhat get a taste for this but when ‘I’ try to get close it’s like I inevitably start drifting off into the other options!
Writing all this though I realise something quite fun! That this seems the only unexplained bit now haha.
As in I remember first taking a swing at actualism and none of it making sense experientially, at this point everything else is clear, it’s like all these other riddles have been solved with a solid experiential answer, this one for now remains a muddled mess. And meanwhile the golden cities remain unexplored .
Oh and the last line of enquiry which I forgot :
As an identity ‘I’ am blind to flesh and blood bodies, ‘I’ interact with other identities. So is this near actual caring directed to other identities (that which ‘I’ can experience) or is it directed to flesh and blood bodies, genuinely existing human beings (it seems it must be this one). How can ‘I’ care for something that ‘I’ cannot experience?
Maybe this is the missing bit – you can indeed do it for you! I mean, you wouldn’t do it if ‘you’ dont want to do it. It is to ‘your’ benefit too - ‘you’ get to relieve ‘yourself’ of the burden of feeling like ‘you’ exist and all the mayhem and misery that that entails and having to defend ‘yourself’ etc… it is candy for everyone
Hmm that’s interesting, the actualist in me is screaming with - “but you are not allowed to do it for ‘you’ that is not altruism” haha. It’s like there is a moral here that says ‘I’ cannot do something which ‘I’ desire because that is selfish.
Yea I sense a bit of that age-old morality dilemma of “how can I be pure if I strive to do good for my own benefit?” as in it’s “tainted” if it helps “me” too. But I think this is just silly … this is just a moralistic attempt to counteract selfishness, but the result is still self-centered (just unselfishly so). The key is to not be self-centered , it’s ok to be “selfish” (as in doing something that is good for yourself too)
Otherwise you really have to flagellate yourself for all the enjoying and appreciating you’ve been doing! Bad Kuba, doing something that is nice for you!
Yes that is certainly there as you describe - how can I want all these wonderful things for myself and it really is wonderful, it seems to me like the heights of selfishness and narcissism to desire such things for myself. I am denying myself freedom because that is what a good person would do
@Kub933 for me the caring thing was the very last piece of the puzzle. ‘I’ wanted to self-immolate, I could feel that there was this momentum, this sense of destiny, this tingle in the air. The PCE had shown me what the destination was, but there seemed to be no way to get there - to untie this knot that was ‘me’. Caring for another was the escape hatch to get me out of the circularity of my pursuit. I started thinking just about caring for others, both specific persons - such as my partner and people more generally. Eventually it ramped up into a caring for all and an appreciation of the plight of humankind, which was the same as my plight. In that brief out-from-control phase of mine, the level of universal compassion and empathy reached a real pitch, all backgrounded by having dazzling actuality within a whisker of me. Craigs words about ‘bridging the separation’ between me and others I found useful too. I saw what I would need to give up. It dawned on me what needed to be sacrificed. And then it was all over.
Hard to say how much you should go into caring and when. But if you’re ready to do this and you find yourself stuck, this might be the thing that is missing.
Yes it does seem like the missing bit and it’s also quite interesting how I’ve built up this nice little fort of moral dilemmas around it.
Which I know from past experience that it’s usually there to keep me where I am, to keep me from seeing the simplicity of something and thus moving forward.
Why do I have such a problem with allowing myself to care… It seems because I know where that caring leads to.
I appreciate your contributions here Srinath. You get to say things that I feel compelled to dance around and hint at.
Your inclusion of “universal compassion” into your out-from-control experience is relevant.
Richard et al’s (relatively recent) turnabout as to the importance and intensity of empathy in the actualism process is also telling. For the longest time, empathy was a four-letter word in actualism. Along with love, compassion, sympathy, humility, etc.
I am beginning to suspect that Richard has bitten the hand that used to feed him. That is, not only did empathy, love, compassion, oneness, humility, beauty, and so on, diminish his malice and sorrow and make him happy and harmless, and not only did it ultimately succeed in getting him to an out-from-control virtual freedom (aka an ongoing excellence experience), but that the out-from-control experience was in fact epitomized by all these things.
That to imitate the actual is to ramp up all these actualist no-no feelings. Indeed, love, forgiveness, compassion, beauty, empathy, are described as being imitations of the actual world. Pale or pathetic or meagre imitations by comparison perhaps, but imitations none the less.
Richard (1999): The essence of success in actualism – the wide and wondrous path to actual freedom – is to fully acknowledge that one is ‘human’ and to imitate the actual as far as is humanly possible. Mailing List 'AF' Respondent No. 12
So, imitate the actual? Got it …
Richard (1997): The illusion of intimacy that love and compassion produces is but a meagre imitation of the direct experience of the actual. Richard's Selected Writing on Actual Freedom
Richard (1997): Forgiveness is a meagre imitation of magnanimity, which is one of the many charming characteristics of actual freedom. Richard's Selected Writing on Actual Freedom
Richard (2000): This is because an imitation innocence was produced by the transformed identity now being humble … it never was and never will be the genuine article. Mailing List 'C' Respondent No. 4
Richard (2004): The affective intimacy of love – the delusion that separation has ended via a glorious feeling of oneness – is but a pathetic imitation of an actual intimacy. Mailing List 'AF' Respondent No. 108
Richard (2005): ‘He’ (unknowingly) took the pristine purity of the actual, which beauty is but a pathetic imitation of, to be beauty itself. Mailing List 'AF' Respondent No. 106
The method has to work though and if the method was essentially about maximising the loving and compassionate feelings how would this be any different from what humans have been doing to no avail all this time?
What I observe in myself is that the initial period involves somewhat ‘shelving’ these things ‘over there’ so that a way out via pure intent can be locked onto.
Once the way out is clear it might then be possible to involve all of that passionate energy towards the goal, ‘I’ am all of those feelings and so to commit all of ‘myself’ involves that entire rainbow that is ‘me’ being channelled towards self-immolation.
The other thing as well is that there is a difference between the actualism method (which is all about the felicitous and innocuous) and the actualism process which does seem to be about getting all of ‘my’ passionate energy onboard towards self-immolation.
As discussed in the Q and A from Australia, those 2 things are not linked.
The other thing as well is that although Richard was the first it doesn’t mean that the way he went about it is the best haha that is precisely why there was the direct method.
It was an attempt to pave a better way after Richard, who obviously being the first had no way to know better.
Yes, perhaps it did the trick enough in terms of allowing him to go of malice and sorrow, but eventually was a bit of a time bomb as it pushed him into enlightenment.
