This is a wonderfully succinct way to put it 
At the risk of giving unwanted advice, I just wanted to add for the record that keeping these conceptual questions in mind, while looking for an experiential answer to it, rather than a thought-out one, can really work also!
I remembered when I visited Richard & Vineeto and I was just struck by a logical impossibility. They were telling me that time does not move, that time is still, and that space is still also. And I thought, how could anything possibly happen if time doesn’t move? It didn’t make sense to me. You needed time to pass for things to happen, didn’t you?
But then I was clearly experiencing things happening. Both couldn’t be true (that things happening, and that time stood still). But Richard & Vineeto were telling me it is! How to resolve the conundrum, the conceptual impossibility?
I was able to look for an experiential answer instead and the result was quite potent. I wrote about it in my report in a few spots:
I share this with the intent that Andrew or someone else can read it and see that it’s something they can do, too, and that it might work for them also (as it did for me), to find their way to experiencing pure intent.
Cheers,
Claudiu
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Andrew: The objection I had for years about this description was this; how can something “stream” from something that is “stillness “? Something still, by definition, is not streaming.
It just occurred to me why this objection is wrong. Human Consciousness is finite. The infinitude is, infinite!
And perception of the actual by a finite consciousness (the only type there is) will be experienced as streaming, (link)
Claudiu: This is a really silly objection to have for years! (…) It is resolved simply: just experience it for yourself what is being discussed! And then you can come up with a better way to describe it with your own words. (link)
Claudiu: It is silly to harbor this objection for years and not just go ahead and gain the experiential knowledge instead, to resolve it. Richard’s description of pure intent is apt. However it seems expounding on it has had the result for you to go backwards towards defensive intellectualization. But the intent was rather to encourage you to naively just go and see for yourself! (link)
Andrew: I don’t see how you are adding anything useful to the discussion, by adding your “that’s silly “?
How do you see it adding anything useful? Do you imagine that I otherwise didn’t see that it was silly not to have just asked Richard what he meant?
What exactly is the point you are trying to make here? Considering that Vineeto has already provided lots of links to descriptions of pure intent , and that I am working through them, I hardly see what it is you are trying to say with “that’s silly”.
Sure, it’s silly. Well spotted. (link)
Hi Andrew,
Can you now see what result your “wordy” categorical permission to yourself has produced? (link)
You gave yourself permission to lash out in irritation/ annoyance/ anger (including psychic currents) at anyone who is touching your ‘fragile ego’, to use a common expression. It confirmed that my dire warning “wrong way, turn back” was indeed necessary. And because you did not stop to deal with the emotion that was happening at the time, you could not recognize that Claudiu made very helpful comments and suggestions, including that it is silly to postpone experiencing pure intent by only intellectualizing about it. Quite obviously he had to point that out because you did not see this for yourself “for years”. Instead, this would have been an alternative reaction for you to have –
Claudiu: When I see that something I have been doing is silly, it is wonderful, wondrous and rejoicing news. Because my life just got better, in that moment, by seeing I no longer have to do that silly thing. I often react with laughter and amazement at the silliness. Could I/should I have seen it sooner? Well if I could have I would have. It doesn’t really matter, now – I can’t change the past. But now life will be better going forward.
IOW although feeling hurt or resentful or foolish is a natural reaction, it also is, eh… not sensible, lol. It doesn’t benefit anybody and definitely not yourself either (it just prevents you from acting to improve your life). But it’s up to you. (link)
However, still emotional, your reply was a confirmation that you reject helpful input unless it complies with your ‘self’-preserving criteria –
Andrew: I can let you know now, ahead of time, that it is redundant to call the fact I haven’t dealt with objections before now as silly.
You can continue to post in response to each of them, if that suits you. If pointing out silliness is what is helping you, feel free.
It doesn’t add anything useful to me, even reading it in bold; “just experience pure intent for yourself” That is the entire goal I am working towards. If your or Richard’s and anyone’s imperative command worked, it would have worked by now.
In other words, if just do it advice works for you, that’s great, It’s not been effective for me. (link)
I might as well stop giving any further suggestions to you – because actualism is experiential and not conceptual, and any intellectual or rational answers are only pointing to the possibility to experience it for yourself. Now, with your caveat, how will one know which advice/ suggestion you will gracefully accept and which one is perceived as an insult and responded to as such?
Hence my previous message that you need to have a sincere intent to be happy and harmless in place before breaking down any “directives, missives, constitutions, allotments, franchises, contracts, agreements, treaties, implied or otherwise.”
That said, there is/was a perfect opportunity to put the actualism method into practice – when you wrote your messages last night, your feeling good had waned and had given way to a strong negative feeling. Here is Richard’s description (as demonstration which everyone can use likewise), to, in short, neither suppress nor express the prevalent feeling but to sit with this feeling, whilst being aware that you are this feeling –
Richard: … he was acutely aware, also, that she had his number and, as far as she was concerned, it was only a matter of time before he too succumbed to the same-old same-old; and as he stood there he was uncomfortably aware that the same anger of yesterday was rising, slowly but inexorably, from the solar plexus up toward the rib-cage diaphragm.
There was no way he was going to suppress it—he’d had a lifetime of the failure of the ‘stiff upper lip’ approach—and he was damn’d if he was going to express it, either (for then this four-foot-eleven female would have triumphed over this six-foot-two male yet again); the vision of having to vacate the scene once more—and again and again off into a sombrely-looming future—was not at all an attractive option, yet, if all else failed, he supposed he could always make the unseemly dash to the door.
Thus he stood there still, despite feeling the anger rising ever upward, through the rib-cage diaphragm, and now suffusing the thoracic region with its all-too-familiar temptation.
And he could see her eyes begin to gleam, even through the wrathful glare which had transfixed him all the while, and he just knew she was zeroing in for the kill; his own anger was mounting, ever-simmering and seething it was brimming at the region of the lower throat by now; her face was flushed with purple, with nostrils quite distended, and spittle flecked her livid lips as her shrilling rose to fever pitch; he had left it too late to beat a hasty retreat and his throat muscles quivered as the brimming anger shimmered and shifted into a pre-shout mode born of old and … and, wonder of wonders, that oh-so-familiar throat-muscle quivering skipped a beat or two and began to ease!
With a rapidly-mounting amazement and delight, he marvelled at the fact that he had, in some way, neither suppressed nor succumbed and that he had finally freed himself of domination by this four-foot-whatever fleshly package of seething anger and hatred that had usurped the mother of his and her children.
And as the slowly-setting sun streams golden from the west another world entirely hoves into view.
Pristine and pure, ever-fresh and new, peerless perfection permeates all and sundry, without exception, and he knows with a certainty that his life is never going to be the same ever again.
(full description: Richard, Selected Correspondence, Aggression).
If you don’t want to do it in this way now you can keep the recipe for the next time.
Alternatively, you can allow yourself to acknowledge and recognize that you are this feeling which you experience at this moment until it becomes apparent how silly it is to waste this precious moment of being alive, as now is the only moment you can actually experience (there is the word ‘experience’ again) and you will be surprised what happens – you can easily swing back to feeling good because when experience that you are your feeling you have the choice to be a different feeling.
If you dare doing this – and it is a daring because it will change ‘you’ (and might even eliminate “one of ‘my’ most cherished attributes”, the “subversive” trait (link)) – then you may be able to commit with more confidence to a sincere intent to be happy and harmless – and this is your very entry ticket to an ongoing feeling good.
Cheers Vineeto
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Richard: Pure intent is a palpable life-force; an actually occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the vast and utter stillness that is the essential character of the universe itself.
Andrew: (This doesn’t have its own glossary entry? This quote was copied from This Moment of Being Alive, from the link on the first page)
Hi Andrew,
The entries are under “Intent” in the Library topics and in Richard’s Abditorium (intent).
Andrew: The objection I had for years about this description was this; how can something “stream” from something that is “stillness”?
Something still, by definition, is not streaming.
It just occurred to me why this objection is wrong. Human Consciousness is finite. The infinitude is, infinite!
This “objection” you had “for years” only demonstrates that you remained all these years locked in the conceptual realm of reading the AFT.
The stillness is because time does not move – time is the area in which events happen. It is also because space does not move – again it is the arena in which objects move. Both Claudiu (link) and Shashank (link) have already explained to you – “the experience of the infinitude of space and time is of an utter stillness”.
It requires the experience of the infinitude of space and time to perceive its utter and vast stillness. This stillness will become instantly obvious when your chattering mind stops and your swirling passions halt and ‘you’ go temporarily in abeyance.
Richard: There is an utter purity in the perfection of this universe that one and all live in which wells up ever-fresh from an immense stillness which is the genesis of all that is apparent. This universe is infinite – it has no beginning and no end – it has always been and always will be here … now. Things may come and things may go but the universe itself is everlasting. As the universe’s space is infinite, it follows that it has no edges. As there are no edges to this universe it means there is no centre to it. And as the universe’s time is eternal, it follows that it has no beginning or ending … hence there is no middle. One is nowhere in particular … and I mean this literally, factually. One and all are floating in limitless space and time upon this planet earth, going nowhere and coming from nowhere. The goal in life is to actualise this infinitude and live it as an actuality each moment again. The living of it is to experience being anywhere all at once whilst being nowhere in particular, for this is the living experience of infinitude. For most people, infinitude just means endless … but this is a limited understanding based upon what the self-bound mind can grasp intellectually. [Emphasis added]. (Richard’s Journal, 2004, Page 270).
Andrew: And perception of the actual by a finite consciousness (the only type there is) will be experienced as streaming,
Now what is your definition of “a finite consciousness”? In actualism terminology, the word consciousness refers to a flesh-and-blood body being conscious (the suffix ‘-ness’ forms a noun expressing a state or condition), as in being sentient.
When a flesh-and-blood body being conscious becomes aware of being conscious apperception occurs. In other words, consciousness being conscious of being consciousness … as distinct from the normal ‘self’-conscious way of perception (‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious).
Richard: Apperception is the clear and direct experiencing of being just here at this place in infinite space right now at this moment in eternal time – sans identity and its feeling-fed realities – and it is a wordless appreciation of being alive and awake on this verdant and azure planet. Apperception is where one is living in the already always existing peace-on-earth and is where one is blithe and carefree, even if one is doing nothing: doing something – and that includes thinking – is a bonus on top of the never-ending perfection of the infinitude which this material universe is. Apperception is where one is the universe being stunningly aware of its own infinitude. (Richard, AF List, No. 19a, 1 Sep 2001 – the whole page is well-worth reading).
Infinitude is not compatible with logic, concepts or intellectualization – just look at how mathematicians frantically invent more and more theoretical universes either static or expanding – mathematics cannot deal with infinitude. You need to allow experiencing it. Actualism is not a concept, it is experiential.
Andrew: The other thought, which I never acted on, is; this stillness is the very stuff I am made of. It’s not some distant star streaming pure intent, or a tree, or something outside of this body per se, the proximate location of pure intent as described IS the actual body ‘I’ inhabit. (…)
So, back to the topic; pure intent is experienced as a “stream” originating in the “vast and utter stillness” because consciousness is finite. (link)
You would have been correct in your last sentence if you had not added the “because”. Consciousness being finite only applies to the normal ‘self’-conscious way of perception (‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious). A consciousness free from ‘I’/ ‘me’ is capable of apperception which can experience infinitude.
Pure intent – the palpable life-force, the stream of benevolence and benignity – is experienced because it exists in actuality.
Pure intent is an actual existing stream (not merely experienced as such – apperception only experiences what is actual), the benevolence and benignity being the values of infinitude. (see Richard, AF List, Rick, 30 Sep 2005). Pure intent can be experienced when you become conscious of being conscious (apperception), when you leave the shallow realm of intellectualization and dive deeper, and read Richard’s words with all your being (both eyes open), wanting to understand his words experientially.
Richard: Being ‘alive’ is to be paying attention – exclusive attention – to this moment in time and this place in space. This attention becomes fascination … and fascination leads to reflective contemplation. Then – and only then – apperception can occur. An apperceptive awareness can be evoked by paying exclusive attention to being fully alive right now. This moment is your only moment of being alive … one is never alive at any other time than now. And, wherever you are, one is always here … even if you start walking over to ‘there’, along the way to ‘there’ you are always here … and when you arrive ‘there’, it too is here. Thus attention becomes a fascination with the fact that one is always here … and it is already now. Fascination leads to reflective contemplation. As one is already here, and it is always now … then one has arrived before one starts.
The potent combination of attention, fascination, reflection and contemplation produces apperception, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. Apperception is an awareness of consciousness. It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. Apperception – a way of seeing that can be arrived at by reflective and fascinating contemplative thought – is when ‘I’ cease thinking and thinking takes place of its own accord … and ‘me’ disappears along with all the feelings. Such a mind, being free of the thinker and the feeler – ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul – is capable of immense clarity and purity … as a sensate body only, one is automatically benevolent and benign. (Richard, Articles, this Moment of Being Alive).
Cheers Vineeto
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