Hi Scout,
I appreciate you revealing your interest as it helps to tailor the response to be most helpful.
One useful thing to keep in mind when making this evaluation is, what would someone’s response look like if what they are ‘defending’ is a fact, as opposed to a belief?
For example picture the topic wasn’t whether Richard was the first, but rather that we are all in a plaza and looking at a monument that is an obelisk. And the topic is whether it is an obelisk or a statue that we are looking at.
One might say, hey how do you know it isn’t a statue? I think it’s a statue. If you look at this small part here it looks like part of a statue.
And the others would say no it is clearly an obelisk, here is why… …
This straightforward pointing out of the facts, could look like dogged defense of a belief to someone who really thinks it’s a statue there.
I just point it out because these two can look similar at the first – dogged defense and closed-mindedness and refusal to ‘see’ someone else’s point of view – vs. confidently pointing out the facts. Of course in a philosophical sense someone might be doing the former while thinking they’re doing the latter – but I bring it up for you to have something to think about.
Ultimately the only way to really get to the bottom of it is to see what the facts are for yourself. To that end, the detailed analysis and breaking-down like I did, helps with that regard. But it’s also understandable why other forum-members wouldn’t be interested in rehashing the same years-old topic again and again.
My experience with actualism is that it’s all remarkably straightforward, obvious, delightful, and easy … … in hindsight 
. In other words, once you get it, once you do have that solid PCE as a guiding light, then it is easy to have a PCE as a reference – you just have it. But yes, it can be tricky to have or rememorate the first one. It took me some time.
It is not tricky because it is ‘hard’ though, in the sense of requiring studious effort, great physical activity, or something like this. It is only as hard as ‘I’ make it. It is hard because ‘I’ get in the way, ‘I’ hold onto my beliefs, ‘I’ nurse malice and sorrow to ‘my’ very bosom… and it’s a matter of getting out of the way, which requires ‘me’ to give up things ‘I’ hold dear. It is really about self-sacrifice for the benefit of something better, of something outside of ‘myself’.
Also in case your alarm bells are ringing here: the self-sacrifice is NOT for the benefit of some supreme entity or being called ‘Richard’ or ‘Vineeto’ or a belief system or viewpoint called ‘Actualism’ or a God called ‘Actuality’. The self-sacrifice is to allow the already-always objectively existing purity and perfection of the actual world – that objectively exists even outside the scope of any human consciousness – to become apparent. So you can be sure that you won’t become enslaved for the benefit of some malicious Thing that will manipulate you or take advantage of you.
Rather than giving up your own reasoning to follow a belief system someone else imposed — it’s about giving up all your beliefs, restoring your autonomy (which whether you realize it or not you have already given up to the tenets of the ‘real world’), seeing the facts for yourself, which Richard’s and everyone else’s words are referring to.
Yes, it’s not uncommon for a genuine PCE to devolve into an ASC, at which point the person goes off on a spiritual path instead of the actualist path. Sincerity and naivete are the keys to preventing this from happening.
I would say it’s extremely difficult to misunderstand that Richard is suggesting suppression. He very clearly explicitly and often says not to do that.
But yes it is easy to go ahead and suppress anyway, because it is certainly a common coping mechanism.
It ultimately ends up being a skill issue. Through trial and error — with sincerity being a key — you start to see experientially what it’s like to suppress and what it’s like not to. And you slowly get accustomed to new habits of neither suppressing nor expressing rather than continuing to go down the well-worn paths of the old habits. What makes this easy is that the new habits are actually superior and better, so if you actually have a sincere interest in feeling better rather than worse, you will naturally gravitate towards the new habits.
But if you want to maintain feelings of justified resentment and woe is me, then you will reject the new habits, via often clever and cunning mechanisms like saying it’s too hard or doesn’t really work or only works for some people etc. This lets you continue in your old ways, which you know don’t work, but this way you can maintain a self-image that it’s out of your control and nothing you can do about it.
Well of course it would be silly to follow someone’s advice for how to self-immolate when they haven’t self-immolated yet. Best to listen to the experiential advice of those who have succeeded there. But I haven’t seen any of this on the forum, certainly not recently.
However remember the method is the same, the means is the same as the end, and this is none other than enjoying and appreciating being alive. You can certainly follow the advice of your fellow feeling-beings who have succeeded in enjoying and appreciating being alive in a more consistent manner. If they succeeded with that and share how they did it, it’s certainly not the blind leading the blind — it’s those with success giving experiential advice to their fellow human beings.
Well it took Richard about 12 years, same for Vineeto and Peter I think — so I’m in good company
But it’s not about the length of time, it’s about how effectively and willingly one allows oneself to feel good, and sacrifice those aspects of one’s self to enable it to happen more, until the ultimate sacrifice of me in my entirety.
Geoffrey seemed to have quite a knack for it, he said when he came across actualism he had already figured out that feeling good makes sense as a thing to do — which took me a while to grasp experientially even with years of repeatedly reading about it lol.
Anyway the point is everyone is where they’re at and it’s ultimately up to you how rapidly you proceed!
Cheers,
Claudiu