I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.
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Talk about synchronocity! Haha.
A mere few hours ago, the thought popped up in my mind that how come Richard said that the psychic currents can affect people in far-off places.
I also put such(things that Richard said) occult and clairvoyant things off as distracting and unrelated stuff. I would be excited to listen to what others here have to say about psychic stuff that Richard spoke about.
Yes definitely interested in hearing your take on these things as you are good at making things more ‘digestible’ 
The other one that always interested me is how after a certain event (it might have been Vineeto becoming fully free) feeling beings are now able to establish a connection to Pure intent without the PCE whereas before this event Pure intent was only available via the PCE.
Oh and also another wild one that I think @henryyyyyyyyyy mentioned was Richard mentioning that it is possible that once enough people become Actually free the psychic web will collapse and people will become spontaneously free without realising. I don’t know where on the site this is tho, maybe @henryyyyyyyyyy can help.
Another one that me and @Sonyaxx had some giggles about is some of Richards writings about sex and how his companion at the time had to remove herself from sex with Richard as it was so good that she would literally go insane were she to continue.
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This stuff is really ‘weird’, I agree… but! I don’t think it’s accurate, and is maybe misleading (I am sure some contentious characters will one day see this and have a field day with it lol) to characterize it as the ‘occult’ (as in “mystical, supernatural, or magical powers, practices, or phenomena”)
Maybe we can say “Actualism and the ‘Weird’”?
In any case, there are basically two categories of weird here: 1 – weirdness relating to the human condition, and 2 – weirdness relating to the actual world.
Human Condition Weirdness
The psychic currents / psychic networks seems the most weird at first glance, but maybe that’s just because no one has explained it quite this way before. However I found that understanding this was basically a key element that clicked together my understanding of how the world works in terms of affective and what are called ‘psychic’ phenomena (i.e. what occult properly refers to).
Emotions
For me the way to approach is to first recognize that emotions are themselves not of-the-senses. They are extra-sensory perception, felt intuitively. This already will seem weird to some, but as it happens to every single person it should be clear it is not that ‘weird’ at all, but rather, ‘normal’.
Emotion Weirdness
The weird thing with emotions is that they are not physical phenomenon. Though the effects of emotions can be measured - like blood pressure, heart rate, electrochemical signals in the brain results from them, the emotions themselves don’t occur in actuality, there won’t ever be such a thing as an “emotionometer”.
Vibes
Once that no longer seems weird, then you consider vibes. Vibes are a palpably experienceable phenomenon. All you have to do, as a feeling-being, is go to a sporting event or a parade and it will become clear.
Also I’ve had very clear experiences on multiple occasions of being in a fight or argument or contentious situation with a person, after which I decide to take a walk or physically separate myself from them, where I notice that about 20 feet out or so I experience a palpable relief, which comes as a result of our vibes no longer being ‘in reach’ of one another.
Vibes are basically literally feeling something that the other person is feeling. As evidenced by the 20-feet thing, it isn’t just a matter of seeing them and instinctively evaluating what they are feeling and then having a feeling-reaction myself. This isn’t my perception or understanding of what they are feeling – it is something coming ‘from them’.
This thoroughly explains a lot of phenomena that can’t otherwise be explained, like for example why sometimes when couples fight they “can’t be in the same room” with each other – it is not only the fact that they are fighting in and of themselves, there’s also this additional component of the vibe. And the effect of crowds, parades, concerts, mobs, etc.
Vibes are precisely what this unfortunate person is referring to in this snippet here about the Jan. 6 capital riot in the USA:
She is not making it up – she did palpably feel, experience, and get sucked into “dark energy forces”. As her lawyer put it: "The lawyer said Castro “got caught up in the moment” on Jan. 6 and “had a lapse of judgement and said things that were uncharacteristic of her.”
Animals also are particularly sensitive to vibes. On one occasion I was home alone with the dogs, I got extremely upset and worked myself up into a frenzy, ran into the bedroom and hit the pillows a few times. It was full on anger and rage. And one of the dogs ran into the bedroom and started barking at the wall. Though she may have been triggered by the sound of me hitting the pillows, really what she was responding to was the intense angry vibes that I was (involuntarily) putting out, to the extent that she felt there was an intruder in the house that she had to protect me from (she had no idea that it came from me). And in a sense I was an ‘intruder’ in that moment (though the rage quickly passed).
Vibe Weirdness
The particularly weird thing about vibes is that they apparently don’t travel through a physical medium, although they do have a physical distance limit. But it is something that occurs in the affective ‘plane’, not in the actual world. Just like no instrument could pick up emotions, there will never be such a thing as a “vibeometer”.
Psychic Currents
Once vibes no longer seem weird then the next level up is psychic currents, which occurs in the psyche itself, which is essentially the backdrop wherein all affective experience occurs.
My work colleague, a staunch materialist there-is-no-meaning-to-life if there ever was one, relayed an experience he had of driving one day, where he suddenly had the intense urge to “get the hell out of here”, to “run”, like something horribly wrong was occurring. He rounded a corner and then off into the distance saw an abandoned building, with smoke coming out of it. It was basically, he later found out, a condemned building with a lot of homeless people living in it, and it was essentially a “hell-on-earth” situation, rampant drug use, people hurting and probably killing each other, etc.
He said that he must have caught a whiff of a particle of human flesh burning or something which put him into the huge alert hyper-drive (he also denies vibes occur), but rather to me the better explanation is that he experienced a psychic current that was emanating from this hell-on-earth, which he got tuned into/picked up on due to approaching it.
For another example of the power of psychic currents I would simply point to the COVID pandemic. It is eminently a case of mass hysteria, a global panic.
How does this global panic spread? A materialist would say well it is the news, and people’s common reactions to it, etc. But a far more comprehensive explanation is that it is a stark terror and fear that occurred in the human psyche, that everyone is swept into and then in turn propagates themselves, which of course the leaders and decision-makers and law-makers and scientists also feel/feed-into, which then informs their decisions and actions about what-to-do.
I remember when the first lockdowns first happened, I took a walk outside in sunny Portugal, and I felt like the earth had become drab, a horribly infested apocalyptic planet, where disease was in the very air and we were all going to succumb to it. I felt like a pallor had come down over the world. Although then when I directed my attention to rememorating the PCE, I was able to sense, though not fully experience, the fact that nothing had changed.
I wrote Vineeto about it at the time (March 18, 2020) and she responded on March 20:
The actual world is as amazing and wonderful as ever, with particularly sparkling mild autumn days at present. No pallor has fallen over the actual world.
So all this sense of there being “a rare state of emergency” is part and parcel of the affective perception of each person and of societies as a whole. Given that a large group of people is psychically affected by the effect of and fear about the virus, the psychic currents and its various medical, economic, political and practical side-effects would be quite strong and even overwhelming.
That is to say, the pallor I was experiencing, was not just ‘my’ reaction to hearing news about the lockdown… I was feeling the effects of the psychic currents that were at-the-time swarming around the human psyche.
(To forestall any criticism, I am not saying COVID did not happen, or downplaying the sickness and deaths that occurred as a result of it. But rather, many years down the line, when we all look back at what actually happened and how we could have responded, no doubt the perhaps less-than-reasonable measures that were taken in certain places, can be at least partly explained due to the psychic currents mentioned above.)
(Also, no doubt the “dark energy forces” that Mariposa Castro experienced, above, was not just the result of vibes on the day of, but also psychic currents that had been building and swirling at the time leading up to the event, no doubt generated, fueled and propagated by opportunistic peoples who wielded it as a very potent tool/weapon to accomplish their own ends.)
This also explains phenomena like people sometimes “knowing” when their loved ones are in danger or when they pass away, even if they are on the other side of the globe. Of course a lot of the time these feelings are wrong (i.e. not a result of psychic currents, they are just mistaken), but it does explain why it happens when they are right.
Psychic Current Weirdness
The weird thing about the psychic currents is that they occur only in the human psyche. They don’t actually occur… there will never be any “psychic-current-ometer”. When the world is actually freed, they will never have existed in the first place. Yet they do affect people, palpably so, and this causes them to take actions that have consequences in the actual world, of course…
The other weird thing is that they don’t have any limit on distance. As Richard put it, “as they have no existence in actuality there is no such thing as a physical distance for them to travel”.
It does make the mind boggle then how they can occur, if they don’t actually exist… but the same can be said of vibes, and of emotions (and therefore ‘people’ as feeling-beings) in and of themselves.
I’m starting to slow down here so will leave it at that, and address the other points in more detail later… curious what people think 
.
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Yes, over the years I have thought about this quite a bit and the confusion or even rejection this may cause in readers (as it did in me). I have had a few conversations with a non-actualist friend who read these texts and asked me about them. He is rationally a materialist/scientist, but emotionally he is a spiritualist (in the sense he has the hope and need for there to be something beyond the physical world -including afterlives-). With his rationalistic/scientific thinking he interpreted as a contradiction/incomprehension all this when contrasted with the flesh-and-blood-bodies-only perspective. With his spiritualistic emotion thinking he interpreted a hope that there was “something more” than the physical world.
So I could never explain them to him (neither to myself), because I think from Richard’s convoluted words that the problem his statements generate is not due to his phenomenological descriptions: it’s attributionist. There would be no problem in accepting as a hypothesis any psychic phenomena that Richard or someone else described, however strange and incredible it may seem (premonitions, remote communication between people, remote perceptions by animals, etc), but as far as I understand Richard systematically refuses to attribute ANY physical mechanism to them. And it is the mechanism to which he attributes their operation that is the only important thing.
He insists on attributing them to “psychic”, “emotional”, “sentimental” means and/or uses vague words like “web”, “collective consciousness”, etc. At the same time, as far as I understand, refuses to attribute those phenomena to physical mechanisms/means (electromagnetic fields, etc.).
When explaining that we can perceive the anger or love of someone close to us or of multitudes, he seems to indicate that it is due to the senses (sight, sounds, etc.), but when referring that these perceptions can also occur at a distance I do not find that he explicitly attributes their capture to unsuspected capacities of those same physical senses. And he also refuses to attribute it to meta-physical means (since, as far as I understand, for him there is nothing “beyond” physical mechanisms and laws).
So, maybe someone can help me to extract, from the convoluted words/answers that Richard keeps coming back to, the answer to the following question (that is, I am not asking for your opinion or other sources, but for help in the exegesis of Richard’s words to answer it, helping to understand what HE thinks about it):
- Can any physical mechanism/attributionism be extracted from this or any other text that explain HOW those phenomena happened/happen without falling into pseudo-explanations like “psychically”, “through the collective consciousness”, “sentimentally”, etc. -that do not really explain anything-?
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@claudiu agree with the designation ‘weird’ as being more appropriate. Have changed the title to reflect that.
Actually ‘the weird’ has been increasingly embraced by a highly heterogenous bunch of people to designate phenomena in the culture that are outside the bounds of conventional discourse and apart from the occult, magick and spirituality - may include things like UFO’s, cryptozoology, obscure philosophies, energetics and a tonne of other ‘out there’ stuff
OK that is quite the feast of posts. Will need to get some sleep and then come back to digest and carry on this conversation
Just by chance my post was published instantly after yours, @claudiu (evidently we were writing at the same time), so it may have looked like it was a response against yours because you rightly gave opinions and sources, but no: I had not had the chance to read yours.
Now that I read it and although yours is not based on what I thought was more useful (helping us to understand through the exegesis of Richard’s words to what mechanism he attributes those phenomena), it is interesting and I take the opportunity to ask you about this premise/beginning:
So how the emotions of other people would be perceived at a distance without the senses? To what means/medium and mechanisms would you attribute the possibility?
(EDIT: later I noticed that you may be formally using the phrase “extra-sensory perception” and perhaps you believe in ESP -appearing in our imagination what someone else imagines, “seeing with the mind” the cards that someone keeps behind his back, etc.-).
As I clarified in my posts, it would be a waste of time to answer “psychically”, “emotionally”, etc., since I think they would not explain the means/medium and mechanisms any better than “intuitively” or “by the akashic records”.
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Hmm perhaps instead of me just answering “psychically” or “emotionally” then, I can pose the question back to you —
How are your own emotions perceived without the senses? To what means/medium and mechanisms do you attribute it?
Hmm not quite, and I’m using the term in an uncommon way, yet purposefully so. Because, for example, here are some definitions of it:
- extrasensory perception (ESP) , perception that occurs independently of the known sensory processes. [extrasensory perception | psychology | Britannica]
- Extrasensory perception or ESP , also called sixth sense , includes claimed reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. [Extrasensory perception - Wikipedia]
Basic, plain old regular emotions fit this definition. They are not perceived through any of the 5 basic senses, nor through thoughts if you count those, nor through any other known sensory processes such as proprioception. Rather, they are perceived intuitively/affectively/emotionally… which, interestingly, is sort of tautological. “How do you perceive emotions? Well, emotionally of course…”
However the definitions immediately go on to say:
- Usually included in this category of phenomena are telepathy, or thought transference between persons; clairvoyance, or supernormal awareness of objects or events not necessarily known to others; and precognition, or knowledge of the future. [extrasensory perception | psychology | Britannica]
- The term was adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as intuition, telepathy, psychometry, clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.[1] [Extrasensory perception - Wikipedia]
And another site says:
These are all fairly “out-there” things… that don’t occur commonly. But the reason I use the term ESP is to point out that basic plain old regular emotions, in and of themselves, also fit the definition of ESP. So, if ESP is a weird thing, then so, too, are emotions .
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i am having a problem fitting all this in with what Peter says here: Topics Sensation , and here: Topics Affective Feelings ,
where he says there are [only?], “three ways a person can experience the world”, and he attempts to: “discriminate between the pure sensate sensual experiences, as in sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and the cerebral thought and affective feeling experiences”. He further indicates: “these imaginative thoughts and passionate feelings only exist as thoughts in the head (or felt in the heart as a direct result of instinctual chemical surges) – this psychic other-world is but a product …” here: Topics Psyche .
Additionally, these in their entirety ( Frequently Flogged Misconceptions Thoughts Create Feelings and Mailing List 'AF' Respondent No. 25 ) are pertinent, indicating as they do (perhaps only to me that the entire “psychic web” (psyche, or what @claudiu SEEMS to refer to as “vibes”, etc) is what IS the (illusory sense of) separate entity-hood or “self”.
Richard:
… the identity within is the affections (the affective feelings) – ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’ – as the instinctual passions form themselves into a ‘presence’, a ‘spirit’, a ‘being’ … ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being is ‘being’ itself .
Hmm I’m not seeing the issue - can you maybe phrase it as an explicit question?
If it doesn’t pop out fairly self-evidently, it is probably inconsequential or illusory on my part, but . . .
it boils down to - how could there even BE an (actual, physical) “mechanism” behind/explaining an other than actual/physical (ie; “psychic”) event or occurrence (“vibe”, etc)?
unless i grossly misunderstand, it is just such . . . “psychic stuff” (“vibes” that can affect at a distance such as the “dark energies/forces” in the example that @claudiu mention) that EXACTLY comprises that which is . . . “extinguished” in ActualFreedom - namely, that of an entity (“i” or “me”) that exists separately from (and thus rides around in/on/around/thru) this (physical) body.
but, “i am only an egg” as the immortal Heinlein put it
Aye you’re on the right track. As the occurrences we’re talking about aren’t actual/physical, then there can’t be an actual/physical mechanism that explains them…
Ah I see your question now. Peter wrote: “(or felt in the heart as a direct result of instinctual chemical surges)” and your question is, how can these affective/psychic phenomena be the result of instinctual chemical surges?
I believe that Peter meant ‘felt’ in this case as in a physical sensation – as in, the results of the passionate feelings are sensately experienced as for example elevated heart-rate, which heart-rate is elevated as a result of the chemical surges, that were released as a result of the passionate feelings in the first place.
Either that or he just got it wrong — elsewhere on the AFT site it is clearly expressed that emotions cause hormonal surges, and not the other way around (i.e. it is not that hormonal surges cause emotions).
And just to add, @Miguel wrote: “When explaining that we can perceive the anger or love of someone close to us or of multitudes, he seems to indicate that it is due to the senses (sight, sounds, etc.) […]” but I don’t think this is the case, Richard does not attribute these things to the senses, actually he explicitly says it is non-sensory (as in able to feel the vibes through a closed door upon coming home).
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OK, then. Understood
Better not, to avoid detours such as successive questions/comments on my answer, etc. Let’s assume that I perceive them as you do.
So you were going to respond “psychically” or “emotionally”, because
OK. So, you have taken the senses out of the way, and you have stated that Richard does not attribute the perception of emotions to the senses “(as in able to feel the vibes through a closed door upon coming home)”.
This actually sheds some light on at least part of the way Richard would conceive that emotions are perceived at a distance: their reception/re-production would be non-sensory.
I do know statements like these ones: Vibes; Vibrations; Psychic Currents, and particularly relevant is this summary:
Put briefly: a feeling being (an emotional/ passional entity within a body) imbues thought with affectivity and those affectively-tinged/ affectively-charged thoughts are involuntarily broadcast, as psychic currents/ energies, into the real world (the world of the psyche) … thus another feeling being does not pick-up thoughts as such but, rather, intuitively feels what those psychic currents/ energies convey.
This quote regarding their emission/broadcast helps the exegesis I was referring to.
So, can you provide any quote/reference about what would happen according to Richard between that emission and reception?
That’s what I never found, other than references to “by means of a psychic web”, “by means of an inerconnection between all feeling beings”, etc.
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I think what you’re asking is, by which mechanism precisely, are vibes/psychic currents emitted and received between/amongst feeling-beings?
As in, how is it that one feeling-being emits a vibe/current, and another receives it – how does this ‘transmission’ happen, precisely?
The reason I was going to instead pose a question back to you, was because the answer to that question, is the same answer as the answer to this question.
i.e.
Question 1 - How does a feeling-being perceive/‘receive’/pick-up-on their own emotions?
Question 2 - How does a feeling-being perceive/‘receive’/pick-up-on vibes / psychic-currents?
Answer to Question 1 - Intuitively, emotionally, psychically.
Answer to Question 2 - Intuitively, emotionally, psychically.
I understand this seems like a non-answer… but it is the best answer I can give.
Because if you were to then ask, how is it that a feeling is felt intuitively/emotionally/psychically? By what mechanism, specifically and exactly, does such a thing happen (an emotion arising, and being felt/experienced)? My answer would have to be, I honestly have no idea. All I know is that I intuitively experience these things to exist, and ‘myself’ as a feeling-being to exist… and that in a PCE it all disappears entirely and was seen to never have really existed in the first place.
Admittedly there is an extra aspect where it is a feeling/emotion involving multiple people, in a sense… I can’t say I have a good answer. But from what I observe to happen and experience myself to happen, it is a thing that happens.
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Exactly.
That’s why your original post went perhaps as far as it can with the information we have.
So, aside personal opinions/comprehensions, if any actualist finds quotes or has conversed with Richard on this precise aspect, I think it would be very useful to share it, not only for us but for any reader of those weird passages.
We could go with the view that we live in a universe whose causal mechanisms we are only very dimly aware of - regardless of how educated and scientific we think we are. Our commonsense rationality is but a thin crust on an impossibly vast seething mass of chaos and irrationality that us puny primates have no hope of ever discerning completely.
Something of this view becomes a reality to me when from time to time I am able to peer into the infinitude of the universe. To call it enormous would be to diminish it. Likewise with calling it logical or intelligent. It is so so much more. That ‘so much more’ cannot be exhausted by anyone really.
Okay so that’s clearing some space for me to launch into some out and out speculation!
Truth be told I always did like the weird stuff of actualism knocking about in the background. I was glad it wasn’t some sterile Secular Buddhism purged of all the fun stuff (like Tulpas) to turn it into some sort of mental gymnastics or psychology system. But I was also glad it wasn’t esoteric and mystical or obviously it wouldn’t have been for me.
Some very tentative musings …
Pros: There is something to this psyche vs actual division for sure. When I became actually free in addition to vibes, a lot of liminal spooky stuff e.g. fear of the dark, seeing something out of the corner of my eye, a vague sense of unease in certain situations, wondering about the existence of extra-corporeal entities etc. dried up leaving me crystal clear. Whereas when I was a feeling being all that stuff felt quite substantial at times. Also Richard’s psychic vs. actual material division then has the advantage of at least including a lot of everyday affective experiences and strange phenomena that science would never get a look into. It is a fairly straightforward model that has explanatory power - if you can buy it. The whole thing is pretty elegant methinks. Wraps up most phenomena real and imagined pretty tidily.
Cons: Well it is pretty weird on the face of it. It’s not like your average atheist skeptic buddy is going to go, “oh a psychic blanket covering the earth causing ghosts and big-foot sightings, preventing me from becoming actually free you say? I’m into it, sign me up!” 
But ‘sciency’ people can be a bit uptight and boring as we know. I’d say weird stuff needs a weird model - much like self-immolation and the human condition. Moving on to other cons, what about the sheer gamut of things that psyche is responsible for. The list is pretty extensive as we find here. Is that over-inclusive or simply complete? Richard gives more of an existential (i.e. real) status to paranormal phenomena such as telepathy, telemetry, akashic records etc. than many here would probably agree with. But then it is simultaneously dismissed as the mere play of affect, frustrating both occultists and materialists in the process!
Moving away from the pro vs. con debate, I do find the non-local effects of both psyche and the actual to be quite an intriguing topic to which I have an open mind. I have had some minor experience with the paranormal as a feeling being - but nothing as far as the non-local effects of the actuality are concerned. Not all the paranormal stuff mentioned in the AFT is to my taste and psychic currents have always been an iffy one for me personally. I don’t think anyone should feel compelled to ‘believe’ in all of this. Your progress towards actual freedom need not suffer. Experience with vibes is very valuable and instructive however.
Miguel I don’t know if there is any kind of sufficient theory of the paranormal that would be acceptable to a sceptical physicalist. But ideas like quantum entanglement, holographic universe, psychological theories etc. have been invoked. Whether you’ll be convinced by them is another matter.
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