This is a flash post. I’ll probably edit the title and add to the body as I reflect more on things.
It occurs to me these are the three biggies. And the more I challenge them the closer to PCEs I move. The less I challenge them the farther away I get. Ceasing to challenge them is totally understandable. Maintaining the attitude to challenge what gets in the way of PCEs takes a lot of energy and flies in the face of normality and belonging. Blindly accepting them is way more natural.
@henryyyyyyyyyy and I have talked extensively about beauty. And he is well active here. So I assume this forum understands beauty as well as I do if not more-so. Beauty is a promise. @henryyyyyyyyyy called it a red herring once. For sure! A red herring that seems part biological and part conditioned to me. We encounter beauty and we are instinctively stunned. It’s like our world stops for a brief moment. And we instinctively feel that if only we can have that for ourselves in one way or another then our lives would be perfect. This belief/instinct can be easily challenged at first. But beauty is so ingrained/instinctual that eventually we get exhausted. Challenging it over and over again saps our strength. I, for one, eventually relent and unquestioningly accept beauty to be the natural order of things: Which it is within the psychic realm.
Boredom interrupts our daily life to the same degree. But, unlike beauty, it’s not external. Something within us stuns our perception. And it’s a painful feeling. Telling us that our current actions need to be wound down and we need to move on to something else. That feeling/instinct too can be challenged. But, just like beauty, it’s so ingrained and instinctual that challenging it becomes exhausting. And we gradually relent. Sooner rather than later, we are back to accepting it as a part of the natural order of things: Which it is within the psychic realm.
Disgust is a bit different. I think it’s more primitive. Richard’s observation of the jelly fish often comes to mind when I feel disgust. Aversion and anger are less primitive feelings I include in the same category. They too can be challenged. They seem to be external like beauty but ambiguous and broad like boredom. Some obstacle appears and we feel an aversion to once again having to deal. (Or reading an article that angers us or seeing something like roadkill or dogshit that disgusts us) They can be challenged too. But once again they are so ingrained and instinctual that our energy levels sap and we relent. Sooner rather than later, we blindly accept them as the natural order of things: Which they are within the psychic realm.
Interesting! I have definitely been stuck with those same things in the past, nowadays they play a much more minimal role. Beauty is largely not an issue, boredom still there but way less so these days, disgust also largely minimised. I agree that they seem quite ingrained past just the social level.
The one thing that came to my mind when reading your post was that the way out is actuality. As in trying to fight and remove these things is as you say a loosing battle, the way for me is to find and allow the purity of the actual.
Beauty is a powerful drive but there is something infinitely more fascinating than beauty. Boredom is not even a word in my vocabulary when I am swimming in purity, actually wanting to be here. Disgust is equally replaced with a keen interest in things being experienced as they are.
Disgust was a big one for me in relation to sex, I was fundamentally averse to the various functions of this body when stripped of all the mystique, but eventually I pushed into something more fundamental that underpins the beauty/ugly dimension. And in that intimate place these things cease to exist, they are replaced with something incredible.
@Kub933 Challenging those three things is simple. It’s simply a matter of comparing whatever little purity one can experience at this moment to the boredom, allure of beauty or aversion one is feeling. And it works. I just find it difficult to sustain that attitude. Beauty, boredom and disgust are just that ingrained.
I wouldn’t be too concerned about sustenance per se, it’s more about catching those periods of boredom, disgust, beauty, aggression, sorrow as quickly as possible. And then purity can resume for as long as it does until another trigger pops up
What’s most useful is gradually increasing the sensitivity to those emotions occurring & tagging that as the reminder to engage the method (enjoying + appreciating / experiencing purity) + dismantling whatever trigger it was
That’s Richard’s ‘flashing red light’
And with more and more and more application of the method, the periods become more sustained just because there are fewer triggers around. I’m sure you’ve already experienced this
Yeah I’ve found it the same way, it’s like the scales tipping ever so slowly towards the experience of purity. But those scales are most certainly tipping
I don’t think qualitatively anything else needs to happen but to keep exposing the beauty, boredom and disgust and to keep coming back to the purity.
Eventually the only way to end those things is ‘me’ disappearing completely along with the beauty, boredom and disgust.
One of the things I’m reminded of from this discussion is how Richard found it quite perplexing that beauty dissappeared after he became free…he didn’t seem trying to end beauty…enjoying while it lasts
This has got me thinking about something that I observe in myself. I remember Srinath wrote something a while ago that what happens is that the ‘being’ becomes separated from the purity. The ‘being’ itself cannot be minimised with the method but it seems like with repeated experiences of purity something does happen. I’m no neuroscientist lol but I wonder if it’s a case of the brain pathway which is responsible for pure consciousness becoming more ‘favoured’ over the instinctual brain pathway which normally dominates. So the ‘being’ is still there but it is kinda laying more and more ‘dormant’ whilst the brain is increasingly allowing this other dimension of consciousness to happen. This is how I am finding it in myself, I think.
So all the beauty, ugly etc are all there ready to be launched at any moment, but somehow this brain is simply more pre-occupied with the clean and pure aspect of consciousness.
Although I cannot quite see how the felicity and innocuity which the ‘being’ is generating during those times fits in the the picture. I guess it is the experience of purity which can only have a felicitous/innocuous effect on the ‘being’ which is now mostly out of the way.
Actually this kind of fits for me experientially because I am getting this sense lately that the only thing ‘I’ have left to do is to enjoy and appreciate whilst the rest unfolds of its own accord.
For me, I always hated the power that beauty had over me. Me and my friends were quick to notice that we could meet a partner we found more compatible, got on great with but if somebody more beautiful came into the picture then it was like all the other great qualities got relegated. We were so susceptible to manipulation just for that positive reinforcement from somebody attractive.
I still see it in my behaviour when commuting, I feel the pull to look at somebody beautiful so intensely. It is hard to not look back and yet not want to be creepy and keep perving at them.
Additionally, the desire to be beautiful is one of my strongest urges. I really wish I was somebody beautiful.
I really really relate to this relenting to it. I see myself relapsing into that, then there are associations to sexual desire, horniness and then to self perception and self disgust for not meeting my own beauty standards.
For me, I rarely experienced boredom, even growing up. For me, boredom kicks in when I am doing things I don’t want to do such as chores. All these things I thought robots would be doing now, like cleaning out rabbit poop. So for me, there has always been this association between boredom and resentment. With loving day dreaming and imagination for story ideas, it meant there was always I way I could escape whilst also doing chores and working though. I would learn to do things on auto pilot and so I could just go into day dreaming. It was again AF and HAIETMOBA that made me realise how often I was doing this auto pilot thing.
Disgust, is interesting, from things that are physically disgusting like rabbit poop to finding myself unattractive and hating my reflection, but then you have other dimensions, being disgusted by people’s depravity or callousness.
What if he receives it instead…pegging time…too much?
Now that I read it I can see why you’d get that impression lol
