Bub introduction

Actualism
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I was first introduced to Actualism by Srinath a few years ago, and to be honest, didn’t really see too much in it. PCE’s, feeling good - Srinath knows I’m chronically hypomanic and feel pretty good on a daily basis. Occasional neuroticism can rock the boat at times, but back on track in a day or two.

I’ve been a glutton for information and learning skills, and got into western esoteric magick, kabbalah, tarot, demon summoning, energy healing, free scientology (outside the church of S nutcases), astral projection, lucid dreaming… I could go on.

Also learnt a ton of healing modalities along the way.

Lots of psychedelics - pretty much everything excluding heroin. Chronic cannabis (mis)use. Now off everything, including alcohol, for a few years - except entheogens - I’ll do mushrooms, ayahausca, ibogaine, 5 meo DMT infrequently. Maybe once or twice a year, maybe each of them once in 3-4 years.

Wanted to get onto the enlightenment bus, and looked into TWIM (Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation) as a reasonable pathway to get there. But I was inconsistent, and my heart really wasn’t in it.

Until I did an ayahuasca ceremony - when I told the shaman I had a problem free life and he said he didn’t know anyone who had fulfilled all their potential, maybe his teacher and she was a superstar. And I thought, the only potential I need to fulfil is kindness to myself and others, and practical self care towards myself and others. Basically happy and harmless.

He asked me to speak to the ayahuasca spirit and see what she said. She said I had done well, actioned lessons learnt, but as long as I had signed up for an identity, I had signed up for suffering.

Since then, it’s like a fire has been lit to move forward with this journey.

I joined the Finders course and whilst it wasnt all that - it delivered, in that dominoes started tumbling in various directions getting me to a sense of persistent fundamental well being.

I thought for a shortcut to have a full understanding of a false self, I could sign up for 1:1 guided inquiry sessions with Ilona Ciunate (author of Liberation unleashed) to get to that sense of ‘impersonality’.

It worked to a significant extent - recognise the false self, but not a 100% convinced.

A google seearch for the end of seeking led me to Salvadore Poe’s Liberation IS book, and I signed up to do three 10 day retreats over the next two months and have just finished the first one. His whole shtick is that he had done a ton of work, lived, learnt and practised with the best teachers and finally found his answer.

For the first time in my life, it feels like the end of seeking. And this realisation is based on the following building blocks.

  • No self.
  • Everything acting and moving as one. Non duality.
  • No free will or control. I dont even know what my next sentence is going to be.
  • No self control without a self. No control without a controller.
  • So the universe acts through me as if life is happening through me. Leela the game of god and life.
  • I am pristine awareness. And this part of me hasn’t changed since I was a child.
  • No matter what I seek or want, I can never be any happier or more tranquil when I am pristine awareness.
  • I had a chronic dissatisfaction with the present moment making it come a distant second best to some arbitrary future moment(s).
  • When the Now is all I will ever have, or even Be.
  • negative emotions and thoughts will come. They will go. I dont have to buy into them if I accept the Isness of things, and no free will on my part or anyone else around me.
  • Wu Wei - non forceful living where I dont try to do anything, but nothing is left undone.
  • So no free will, no self, life working through me, only the now, accepting the Isness of things, and tranquil pristine Awareness is about as good as I can ever feel and no arbitrary future moment can make me feel any better than I do now.

So why am I here, if I’ve reached the end of seeking?

I really like what Richard has to say, and feel his views are the real deal. When I was speaking to Srinath, my initial reaction was Richard made his own route that wasn’t fleshed out by a myriad mystery schools, or religions saying the same thing.

However I now feel Richard’s teaching are the real deal. I do have some misgivings, but happy to work through them and reach a deeper understanding.

Specific misgivings - this focus on feeling good. It’s a bub or self related focus on feeling good. I can pump my mood sky high (Srinath will roll his eyes as he agrees with me) at will. I feel good - so what? I had a PCE. so what?

Why this almost morbid fear of negative emotions or triggers.

Shit happens. We deal with it, and move on.

If something happens, I accept the Isness of things (suffering is resistance to the present moment, and not liking how things are and wanting to change them), show compassion for people or circumstances (no free will or anyone there to be upset with if there are no selves).

If I feel cheated, okay, if I can’t accept the Isness of things, cant forgive the other person, then do something practical about it (keeping happy and harmless principles in mind).

Instead of building a false story about them and myself, about my future and past, feeding into the false self narrative, and further fanning the flames.

Its in the past and as good as never having happened. If I still have negative emotions or feelings, they will pass in minutes, hours or days. Heck, if I’m sleeping, eating and exercising regularly, the chances of me feeling bad or anyone fucking with me is minimal. Shit is more likely to happen when I’m feeling like shit, but when I’m in the now, steeped in Awareness, accepting the Isness of thing, no free will and just enjoying the dance of the world playing out through me and around me, how can I feel crap (unless i move into past or future, and dream up imagined slights or fears).

So yes, this feeling good bit with Actualism is worrying for me - why this almost insecure need to keep looking to feel good, and keep upleveling that feel good feeling.

And that feel good is the egoic self feeling good - which is false and not real if only because it’s transient. Feeling good comes and goes. PCE’s come and go. When Awareness - and the equanimity and joy/bliss associated with it seems the real deal - if we accept what is real as what is unchanging.

There’s also a sort of only one way to see things, but if the dots connect and it makes sense, why not? We have a bad habit of bastardising information and practice to suit our narrative instead of just sticking to what has been clearly demonstrated to work.

Lots of positives - losing the sense of self, consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive, happy and harmless, felicitious feelings, and actual freedom (I dont have to be, do or have anything - everything is perfect and whole, including me and everything around me, as it is).

For now, I’m exploring Actualism and the Direct Path to further deepen where I am now.

Thanks for having me on here -

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Hi Bub, and welcome!

Hmmm well it feels good to feel good, doesn’t it? It’s better than feeling bad? So then why ever feel anything other than good? If you can already do this, then great :smiley: .

But also note that the feeling good of the felicitous feelings isn’t the ‘good feelings’ of the hypomania. Rather it’s a general sense of well-being. It’s different than being energized or zested-up or really motivated or into a project or task, etc…

“Morbid fear of negative emotions or triggers” isn’t actualism – indeed it’s silly to fear such things.

Ok, but instead of feeling bad in those minutes, hours, or days, wouldn’t it be, to put it simply, an improvement to life if you were feeling good instead?

What about those times when life happens and you’re unable to sleep, eat, and exercise regularly? Wouldn’t it be better to not depend on these things to be enjoying being alive? (Although of course it’d be silly not to do them if you can and they do promote your well-being.)

Also rather than the chances being minimal wouldn’t it be better if they were zero?

The drive/motivation to feel good isn’t sourced in insecurity, but rather in the PCE. In the PCE you see that life is automatically already intrinsically inherently enjoyable, without having to do absolutely anything for life to be that way. As you enter the PCE, it’s immediately clear this is a far superior way of being conscious than what came before. Right as the PCE wears off you already know what’s going to come, a reversion back to that less-than-supreme ‘being’. Once it’s already worn off it’s completely normal to totally forget how superior it is, haha, except at the back of your mind maybe, until next time…

But in any case, as you see how good life can be in the PCE, it becomes clear it’s sensible to aim for that and imitate it as much as possible. And that imitation is done via feeling good.

The up-leveling is also not sourced in insecurity. When you’re feeling good most of the time, you’re not insecure about feeling good – insecurity isn’t feeling good you see :laughing: . But rather it’s that feeling great is better than feeling good… a closer imitation to the PCE. And since it’s better to feel great instead of good … … why not feel great instead?

It’s of a totally different nature than a ‘good feeling’ that you get while high, and chasing ever-higher ‘highs’, etc… that’s why in actualism you learn to carefully draw distinctions between “feeling good” and “good feelings”. They’re a different beast entirely, though easy to conflate at first.

Well if you’re consistently feeling good it’s not quite so transient…

About it being ‘egoic’ or transient or not, the idea is to enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive, in and of itself per se (i.e. the unconditional), rather than constantly enjoying specific things that are happening (i.e. the conditional). Although it can never be 100% until actual freedom, you can be relatively unconditionally happy and harmless. It’s really more about removing the things that cause you to feel bad (i.e. seeing it’s silly to let X or Y or Z take away from your enjoyment) rather than adding things to make yourself feel good.

And in any case the standard is the PCE, where you see that life can be that way (unconditionally/not transiently), forever. And though a PCE starts and ends, we have reports of Richard and Srinath etc., who report that it is possible for life to be that way (i.e. how it is in the PCE), forever. So we don’t aim for something transient but rather something unconditional, an absolute if you will. It’s just that this absolute is the physical actually existing universe, and not the metaphysical Absolute of spirituality and Enlightenment etc.

The way I’d put it is that when what you call Awareness is experiencing something unchanging, it’s not an actually existing unchanging thing, but an illusory one that your ‘Self’ is generating. Ego-self may be gone but soul-self is still there. It came into being with your body and will die along with your body.

In a PCE you can see that this supposedly-unchanging thing disappears together with the soul-self, and what’s left is an experience of something that is actually unchanging – which I guess I could say is existence itself in a way, since it’s obvious that things are changing (this moves here, that changes to that over there), but existence always exists haha. This existence was here before your body came to be and will be here after your body dies.

Cheers, welcome again, and hope you find this useful!
Claudiu

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@bub My take on what Richard has discovered is the actual world which can be experienced thru apperception while one is in a pce or actually free. He is talking about the actual physical world which is distinguished from the real world of the psyche.

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Hi @bub , welcome!

I’ll second everything @claudiu says above and add that another reason it’s worth the scratch to become free rather than remaining ‘at the end of seeking’ would be in how we effect others by continuing to emote. Even if you’ve gotten to a point where you don’t mind that you suffer now and then, perhaps you can see that your suffering contributes to the suffering of others who can feel your vibes.

Further to that, when they are effected by your vibes they may then feel or do things in ways that will effect others around them. So it’s worth getting to ‘the end,’ completely free, because it is the most caring thing we can do for everyone around us - not to mention ourselves!

Additionally, I’m not completely convinced when you say you don’t mind suffering - isn’t that the definition of suffering? That it is suffering? Isn’t it nicer to not suffer?

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Hi @bub

What you do not realise, not yet anyway, is that you know one on the most significant humans to have ever existed.

‘Srinath’ willingly and happily gave up ‘his’ life for the good of everyone, including the body ‘he’ inhabited.

You mentioned that you have had a PCE.

Maybe. Maybe not. What you don’t understand, yet, is that a world of actually free people means the end of war, murder, rape, suicide, child abuse and every other heinous activity.

I wonder myself why I haven’t otherwise followed 'Srinath’s ’ example. It seems that I am still OK to live in the world of misery and torture.

It seems that you are too.

Actualism, is about something far more significant than anything you have so far encountered.

Far more radical. Far more extreme. Way beyond something as mundane and yawn worthy as “no self” experiences.

I’ve been there. Thought I had made it.

Your criticism of “feeling good” is a symptom of your abject failure to understand what will actually end suffering for all those alive and yet to be alive.

I don’t experientially understand most of actualism, but I do know what it is to think I have made it.

Normal human convention is to make someone feel welcome. The fact is such a feeling is as destructive as if I shot you in the face.

Welcome who? Another “no self” pretender who hasn’t listened to the pain all around them?

You think you better than Richard, et al; your words reveal who you are. It’s very clear by attacking the very core of his method you believe Actual Freedom is something you can own and add to you list.

Your list is a “who’s who” of pretenders and your achievements a stench to intelligence.

I suspect you have been through more pain than most. Far more than normal. Either that, or you are a narcissist.

Generally, if someone can last more than a week on here, I know it’s the former.

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Ironically, these two groups are the same people. It’s a knife’s edge which side you will fall on.

Perpetuate misery and malice, or turn around and head towards the end of it.

For context, in case you imagine me to be something of a prick; It was exactly words to the effect of what I have sent you which turned me around. It wasn’t even an actualist that said them either.

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Hmmm well it feels good to feel good, doesn’t it? It’s better than feeling bad? So then why ever feel anything other than good? If you can already do this, then great :smiley: .

But also note that the feeling good of the felicitous feelings isn’t the ‘good feelings’ of the hypomania. Rather it’s a general sense of well-being. It’s different than being energized or zested-up or really motivated or into a project or task, etc…

Thanks for taking the time, Claudiu. It’s appreciated :pray:

100% it’s better to feel good rather than bad, but life has it’s ups AND downs.

Maybe the issue is that it’s outside my current reality to feel good 100% of the time.

Life will happen. If an ‘actually free’ person’s spouse or child had an accident, they were physically assaulted, lost their life savings, then the feeling bad will happen, however temporarily. Then a reframe takes place, timeline resets to now, followed by a mood reset back to feeling good (hopefully with practical concerns to resolve the situation taken care of).

Unless I’m mistaken and someone actually free would feel good all through lifes downs.

Morbid fear of negative emotions or triggers"* isn’t actualism – indeed it’s silly to fear such things.

I saw the dealing with negative emotions flowchart and made an 'ass’umption that it was a significant part of the process. Thanks for clarifying that it isnt and indeed silly to fear such things.

Ok, but instead of feeling bad in those minutes, hours, or days, wouldn’t it be, to put it simply, an improvement to life if you were feeling good instead?

Again, it’s outside my current reality to feel good all the time, because life and circumstances will happen and I will have what I feel are natural responses to it.

Not even big things like accident to spouse or child, but small things like being unkind to someone, or being rejected by a significant other, or even a beautiful stranger, can drop the mood for a few minutes.

Is your mood a 100% all the time, no matter what happens or there’s still some way to go?

I know despite what you might feel about Srinath, I can get under his skin - hope I haven’t for years, and not even remotely intending to. But apart from the Richard, Vineeto, Peter references, I’d like some evidence of people feeling good 100% of the time.

Also rather than the chances being minimal wouldn’t it be better if they were zero?

Again, still struggling with this completely zero feeling bad and 100% feeling good response to things.

But IF it is possible, then sign me up for sure!

The drive/motivation to feel good isn’t sourced in insecurity, but rather in the PCE. In the PCE you see that life is automatically already intrinsically inherently enjoyable, without having to do absolutely anything for life to be that way. As you enter the PCE, it’s immediately clear this is a far superior way of being conscious than what came before. Right as the PCE wears off you already know what’s going to come, a reversion back to that less-than-supreme ‘being’. Once it’s already worn off it’s completely normal to totally forget how superior it is, haha, except at the back of your mind maybe, until next time…

But in any case, as you see how good life can be in the PCE, it becomes clear it’s sensible to aim for that and imitate it as much as possible. And that imitation is done via feeling good.

The up-leveling is also not sourced in insecurity. When you’re feeling good most of the time, you’re not insecure about feeling good – insecurity isn’t feeling good you see :laughing: . But rather it’s that feeling great is better than feeling good… a closer imitation to the PCE. And since it’s better to feel great instead of good … … why not feel great instead?

It’s of a totally different nature than a ‘good feeling’ that you get while high, and chasing ever-higher ‘highs’, etc… that’s why in actualism you learn to carefully draw distinctions between “feeling good” and “good feelings”. They’re a different beast entirely, though easy to conflate at first.

Thanks - gradually opening my mind to feel bad even less, feel good much more, feel off the charts fantastic (almost) all the time as a distinct possibility,.

Well if you’re consistently feeling good it’s not quite so transient…

All I need to feel good is to be in the now. It’s only moving into future or past that can affect my or anybody’s mood. Unless it’s the rare instance, where I am in a crisis situation, the Now feels pretty peaceful pretty much all the time.

About it being ‘egoic’ or transient or not, the idea is to enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive, in and of itself per se (i.e. the unconditional), rather than constantly enjoying specific things that are happening (i.e. the conditional). Although it can never be 100% until actual freedom, you can be relatively unconditionally happy and harmless. It’s really more about removing the things that cause you to feel bad (i.e. seeing it’s silly to let X or Y or Z take away from your enjoyment) rather than adding things to make yourself feel good.

Thanks for that clarification.

Take joy from the unconditional. Though I wonder if I have to get the practice with PCE’s to take joy from the conditional i.e. the environment around me.

I can feel good, but feels a bit like trying to fall into the sensate experiences of things to get to a PCE. And hard to hold my concentration for longer than a couple to a few minutes. But if the juice is worth the squeeze, then I’m in.

And in any case the standard is the PCE, where you see that life can be that way (unconditionally/not transiently), forever. And though a PCE starts and ends, we have reports of Richard and Srinath etc., who report that it is possible for life to be that way (i.e. how it is in the PCE), forever. So we don’t aim for something transient but rather something unconditional, an absolute if you will. It’s just that this absolute is the physical actually existing universe, and not the metaphysical Absolute of spirituality and Enlightenment etc.

I’ve been looking at the spiritual freedom vs actual freedom post on the AFT site, and it made a whole lot of sense to me.

Does physical universe mean I have to immerse myself in the environment around me and appreciate it keep getting that PCE experience, till it’s an almost constant OR possible to feel PCE by just feeling good, and that can be built on.

The way I’d put it is that when what you call Awareness is experiencing something unchanging, it’s not an actually existing unchanging thing, but an illusory one that your ‘Self’ is generating. Ego-self may be gone but soul-self is still there. It came into being with your body and will die along with your body.

This is something else that doesnt fit with my current reality - the awareness i speak of is the one referred to by the advaita guru’s i.e. completely unrelated to a egoic self.

AF feels the soul is an illusion too. Unless I’m not quite getting you, which is more likely.

According to AFT
Actual freedom: “The soul (by whatever name) is an illusion.
Spiritual freedom: The soul (by whatever name) is real”

In a PCE you can see that this supposedly-unchanging thing disappears together with the soul-self, and what’s left is an experience of something that is actually unchanging – which I guess I could say is existence itself in a way, since it’s obvious that things are changing (this moves here, that changes to that over there), but existence always exists haha. This existence was here before your body came to be and will be here after your body dies.

Here again, I’m of the advaita view that that unchanging Awareness is something I can access at any time. And it looks like that this feeling good, constant PCE experience is something fundamentally different and feels a whole lot better to boot.

Cheers, welcome again, and hope you find this useful!
Claudiu

Very useful. Lots of food for thought.

I’ll clarify a couple of doubts with Srinath too - namely the feel good ALL the time - is this actually possible even if family suffering health crises, or even small time issues like unkindness to or from others.

And the distinction between Awareness as i see it (advaita neo advaita view), and the feeling good of Actualism.

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That was my third doubt from Claudiu’s very helpful post - do I have to focus on my environment, and senses to get to the PCE and build on that, OR just feel good, and get to feeling great.

From what your saying, it’s the former.

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I’m not sure how my temporary ‘natural response’ suffering of a few minutes or even a couple of days at most can impact other people unless I’m being unhappy and harmful.

And suffering is a big word, it’s my intuition telling me to do better next time and it doesn’t even get to suffering if I convince my intuition I’ve banked the lesson.

But do get the point you’re getting across - freedom is better than the end of seeking.

Hah! I absolutely love when things go pearshaped - I have this hypomanic defense when things go tits up and it’s a challenge to sort out. Srinath and friends call me a painslut.

But I do mind the suffering, namely the self caused suffering - taking things personally, not doing the jobs that were supposed to get done like paying bills, taxes or fines, or fixing things upstream before they become problems and the 5-10 seconds a month I’m clearly irritable with others. The old neuroticism about wanting to get things right. But again, much better with the focus on appreciating the Now.

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The cool thing is that your friend @Srinath has indeed done what we are all here to do! :smiley:

The difference is that prior to actual freedom one is still a ‘feeling being’ which means that one will inevitably be feeling something at all times, this is how a ‘feeling being’ experiences life. After actual freedom there is no longer a ‘feeling being’ inside this body and so there are no longer any feelings at all, but neither is there a ‘self’ to have any feelings to begin with. Then the experience of life is marked by the same perfection and purity which is gleaned in a PCE, however this becomes one’s ongoing and permanent experience.

So the descriptions of how life is experienced before and after actual freedom will have some key differences. For those of us who have not reached actual freedom yet the way is quite simple - as ‘I’ cannot help but experience life via feelings, ‘I’ set the standard of experiencing as feeing good each moment again, this is done to imitate to the closest extent possible what is seen to be possible in the PCE, or what it is like on an ongoing basis for your friend :grin:

So to sum up, prior to actual freedom ‘I’ do my best to imitate the perfection and purity of the actual world by feeling as happy and harmless as humanly possible each moment again, whereas after actual freedom there is no longer a ‘feeling being’ inside this body and so there is only the direct experience of the perfection and purity of the actual world, as is briefly experienced in a PCE.

The other thing I would add is that feeling good 100% of the time has not been documented with the actualism method, instead what is advised (and this is a condition that some of the other pioneers lived for extended periods of time) is to aim for a virtual freedom. Where through habituation ‘I’ get to a point where ‘I’ am feeling good for 99% of the time, and the other 1% does not cause any significant issues.

The 1% difference is there because as long as the ‘feeling being’ is in existence there will always be potential for other feelings to happen.

Although as far as I am aware we do not have anyone at this forum currently living this :joy: I have personally gone from being a pretty miserable and sharp individual to feeling good for a large portion of each day, and feeling bad becoming something that happens less and less frequently and is dealt with more and more easily.

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Although this isn’t the case when I’m playing Elden ring and die for the 10th time on the same boss :joy:

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Welcome @bub !

Since an actually free person doesn’t have a feeling ‘being’ anymore, so they experience no feelings at all…in other words, they don’t even feel good anymore…there is something far far better seen in a PCE

It takes quite a radical shift in understanding what Actualism is about…took me 1.5 years coming from a spiritual background to finally understand one fine day that Actualism is indeed a third alternative…and an entirely new one at that !

RICHARD: I have not felt happy for years and years … here lies perfection. Living here in this actual world there is a seeing, smelling, touching, tasting and hearing of the purity of the infinitude of this material universe for the twenty four hours of the day. It is a sensate experiencing – apperceptive awareness – and cannot be felt affectively. If one minimises the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings (as explained above) and activates the felicitous/ innocuous feelings – happiness, delight, joie de vivre/ bonhomie, friendliness, amiability and so on – in conjunction with sensuousness, then the ensuing sense of amazement, marvel and wonder can result in apperceptiveness. If it does not … then one is way ahead of normal human expectations anyway as the aim is to enjoy and appreciate being here now for as much as is possible.

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Of course! It’s a fun thing to do for me :slight_smile:

Indeed! You can’t do anything about the events in your life having ups and downs. You don’t have total ultimate control over your circumstances. But you will come to see that you do always have a choice how you react to or feel about life’s ups and downs.

This is one of the key revolutionary paradigm-shifting aspects of actualism – you see that it is always your choice, and your choice alone, how you experience being alive. You can’t control that someone cuts you off in traffic – but you can choose whether to get upset about this, or whether to not let it diminsh even the tiniest bit from your enjoyment of being alive.

This is really difficult to grasp and see that this is how it is in its totality. It took me many years! But it should be easy to see that you at least have somewhat of a choice. I always thought of it like comparing different people reacting to the same situation. Some people yell when they’re caught in traffic, or are sad when it rains – for others it doesn’t affect them at all (though other things do). So it’s easy to see it’s at least somewhat of a personal choice.

As @Kub933 said, as a feeling-being only at most 99.9% has been reported haha. And not by anyone on this forum. Although I have personally experienced multiple days in a row at this 99.9% level!

But when actually free it’s a different matter. But I can’t report on that from experience (yet).

Indeed, an actually free person cannot feel bad, because the entity that would be feeling bad – the feeling-being – which is who ‘you’ think and feel ‘yourself’ to be – is gone entirely.

But when it’s put this way it’s common to immediately imagine actually free people as robots or zombies. Nothing is further from the truth. It’s just impossible to imagine that “bad” things happening in one’s life wouldn’t take away from one’s experience of the perfection and purity of the universe. The only way to really see this is to have a PCE for yourself.

Also note that when actually free you don’t “feel” good, per se. The entire affective faculty is gone along with the ‘self’ and the ‘Self’. But it’s not that it leaves a ‘hole’ in its place, an empty void. Rather it’s the other way around – there is a seamless whole and perfect exquisite experience of being alive (as I have seen in my PCEs) and you see that emotions (including felicitous ones) are what was the ‘hole’ in the first place. Or rather it’s more accurate to say that ‘I’ the feeling-being ‘myself’ was the hole. It’s just that the way ‘I’ as a feeling-being experience being alive is via emotions. There’s no distinction between ‘me’ and ‘my’ emotions – they are one and the same thing. This ‘me’ is what is the hole.

Also relevant, see this thread: Does an "actually free" person experience any emotions? .

Haha these things can be nuanced and tricky. It’s not that “dealing with negative emotions” isn’t a significant part of the process – it certainly can be (the extent to which it is is basically the extent to which you experience negative emotions) – but rather that it’s silly to fear them. Fearing them does not do anything productive. It just adds fear on top of the negative emotion already. Rather it’s about simply letting yourself become aware of them (i.e. not fearing them, not hiding from them, etc…) so that such awareness can lead you back to feeling good (because it’s better to feel good than to feel bad).

That being said, if you take a look at the flowchart again you’ll see that you’ve cherry-picked only half the equation.

From the flow-chart there is a ‘trigger’ arrow:

image

And you will see that what the ‘trigger’ arrow leads to, when not enjoyment and appreciation, is:

image

i.e. ‘negative emotions’ are only (an equal) half of the equation. The other half are the ‘positive emotions’. So it seems by your words you reveal that you have a bias regarding the negative emotions, as that’s the only thing that you saw when looking at this :wink: .

Aye of course. That’s normal. It would be strange if your current reality already was feeling good all of the time.

But that’s where actualism comes in. You see that it’s possible – to at least feel significantly good for 99% of the time – and you can make changes in your life to make it happen. It’s really just a question of whether that’s appealing for you, and if so, the decision to start doing it.

From the examples you gave:

  • why be unkind to someone in the first place if it diminishes feeling good? And if you have to be “unkind” (eg they are being unreasonable and you have to assert your interests) then why let that necessary course of action take away from feeling good?
  • why let your feeling good depend on whether your significant other rejects you?
  • why let your feeling good depend on whether a beautiful stranger rejects you? Isn’t it silly to hand over the reigns of your emotional state over to beautiful strangers?

I think it’s better to think of it as maximizing feeling good as much as possible, rather than going for 100%. It is always easy to see the next step of how it can be better – rather than trying to live up to a perfect ideal from the start.

That being said it’s not 100% or even 99% for me, but it’s really quite good. At least recently, feeling good has been normal, with dips below it being less common than not, and I clearly see them, they are separated from each other (they don’t all glom together into one ‘oh god this is all awful’), and I can get back to feeling good pretty quickly.

I find for me it goes in periods though. There are periods like this then periods of feeling bad for days in a row. But on a high level looking over the past few years, there is a clear and constant upward trend.

Talk with Srinath more :smiley: . Also if you were able to get under his skin many years ago but haven’t been able to for a few years, that’s something interesting isn’t it?

Peaceful is one thing… but what about actively enjoyable?

The PCE is great because it shows you how it can be, and what to aim for. That being said it isn’t so hard to take joy from conditionally enjoyable things is it? That’s how most people live their lives :smiley: . Enjoying the good things but not enjoying the bad things… It seems silly to try to make yourself enjoy some conditional thing that is objectively bad. If you stub your toe, it hurts, it’s silly to try to force yourself to enjoy the stubbing-of-the-toe per se. But if you think of it as, ok, I stubbed my toe, and it hurts, but is it worth feeling upset over it on top of experiencing this physical pain? No? Ok! Then you stub your toe without feeling upset about it :slight_smile:

Quite the contrary! That’s not the way to get to a PCE. If you are concentrating or squeezing then you’re going in the wrong direction. This is very critical cause doing this can lead you to an ASC (Altered State of Consciousness) which can superficially sound like the PCE in terms of sensate-only experience, but really the critical component - ‘you’ - are still there in the background. It can be hard to separate the ASCs out from the PCEs at first especially coming from a spiritual background.

The key is that it’s more about feeling good rather than experiencing the senses. If you are feeling good, you’re on the way to the PCE. If you’re feeling great, you’re even closer… if you are simply wondering and marveling at being alive on this verdant paradisical planet, then you are really close! Etc. It’s about how ‘you’ are, not about what senses you experience.

It should be clear from what I just wrote above, but it’s the latter.

Indeed, that’s what I wrote too - “ego-self may be gone” (i.e. “completely unrelated to a egoic self” – since this egoic self is gone) – but “soul-self is still there”. It’s this soul-self that is this awareness you speak of. The soul underlies the ego, comes before it. The ego is built on top of the soul. The soul is the material from which the ego is built. The soul is the seat of the psyche, the seat of ‘your’ emotions. It is who ‘you’ are at the core of ‘your’ ‘being’. This soul is this Awareness, ultimately.

But it only feels like it is unchanging… in actuality it is dependent on the body to exist. The experience of this Awareness is that it supercedes the body… but the experience is delusory :wink: . And I speak from personal experience.

Yea! The amazing thing will be to watch this unconditional unchanging Awareness that can be accessed at any time, completely disappear along with that which was experiencing it, as you enter a PCE :smiley: .

Cheers,
Claudiu

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@bub Yes bub I think you are right, one also needs to focus on the senses to get to a pce. I had not seen it exactly that way when I wrote that but from what you said it has helped me to immediately shift my focus to the senses and see that this is what is needed.

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The cool thing is that your friend @Srinath has indeed done what we are all here to do! :smiley:

I’m not sure Srinath has fully self immolated, don’t think he’s in a PCE all the time, and don’t think he feels good ALL the time.
He’s discussed with me about getting to actual freedom, but also not quite the full self immolation.

He’s got the usual spouse, kids, financial issues most people deal with.

The difference is that prior to actual freedom one is still a ‘feeling being’ which means that one will inevitably be feeling something at all times, this is how a ‘feeling being’ experiences life. After actual freedom there is no longer a ‘feeling being’ inside this body and so there are no longer any feelings at all, but neither is there a ‘self’ to have any feelings to begin with.

Apart from lofty individuals, like Richard, Vineeto, Peter - I’m not seeing anyone who’s done this. Which is not to say it isn’t possible.

BUT keeping an open mind and working through my doubts and learning as much as I can.

Then the experience of life is marked by the same perfection and purity which is gleaned in a PCE, however this becomes one’s ongoing and permanent experience.

I hear it, but not seeing it in anyone here. Not a criticism, and something most of you would agree with.

So the descriptions of how life is experienced before and after actual freedom will have some key differences. For those of us who have not reached actual freedom yet the way is quite simple - as ‘I’ cannot help but experience life via feelings, ‘I’ set the standard of experiencing as feeing good each moment again, this is done to imitate to the closest extent possible what is seen to be possible in the PCE, or what it is like on an ongoing basis for your friend :grin:

My friend hasnt discussed anything like constant PCE with me, and he’s kept me up to speed with most of his interests, insights and progress along the years. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong.

This setting the standard of feeling good in each moment sounds like the first step. Thanks for this.

So to sum up, prior to actual freedom ‘I’ do my best to imitate the perfection and purity of the actual world by feeling as happy and harmless as humanly possible each moment again, whereas after actual freedom there is no longer a ‘feeling being’ inside this body and so there is only the direct experience of the perfection and purity of the actual world, as is briefly experienced in a PCE.

I’m going to put the work into self immolation and dissolve the feeling being.

Advaita says there is no dissolving ego, because there is nothing to dissolve. AF appears to say there is a feeling being that can definitely be immolated.

The other thing I would add is that feeling good 100% of the time has not been documented with the actualism method, instead what is advised (and this is a condition that some of the other pioneers lived for extended periods of time) is to aim for a virtual freedom. Where through habituation ‘I’ get to a point where ‘I’ am feeling good for 99% of the time, and the other 1% does not cause any significant issues.

The 1% difference is there because as long as the ‘feeling being’ is in existence there will always be potential for other feelings to happen.

Of course, life and circumstances can happen.

Although as far as I am aware we do not have anyone at this forum currently living this :joy:

Thanks for your honesty.

I have personally gone from being a pretty miserable and sharp individual to feeling good for a large portion of each day, and feeling bad becoming something that happens less and less frequently and is dealt with more and more easily.

Amen brother :pray:

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Bub, welcome aboard. I can see you’ve been busy :grin:

This sort of dialogue where you go back and forth between people on this forum and co-relate it with what you read on the AFT, will slowly give you a clearer and clearer picture of what actualism and actual freedom are. But beyond this intellectual understanding you’ll need to have your own experiences and PCE’s. Towards that end I’d recommend at least temporarily shelving, bracketing or dropping everything you’ve learned so far about Buddhism, advaita, neo-advaita, end of seeking, Finders course and so on – otherwise you’ll be mixing mutually incompatible methods and just end up getting confused and going nowhere.

There is no such thing as a ‘partial self-immolation’. It’s an all or nothing thing. But there is a difference between a basic (also called ‘newly free’ or ‘peace on earth AF’) and a full (also called ‘meaning of life’) actual freedom. As far as we know only Richard and Vineeto are fully actually free. Peter as well as the rest of us muppets are basically free! Like a full freedom, a basic freedom is characterised by an absence of feeling being and emotions – but unlike a full freedom it is liable to being clouded from time to time by the circumstances of life as you’ve mentioned. Also unlike a full freedom round-the-clock awareness of infinitude and apperception (PCE like clarity and directness of experiencing) are absent in a basic freedom – and social identity issues are present.

http://actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/vineeto/actualvineeto/alan.htm

Unlike a feeling being, a basically free person has the kind of access to apperception that is relatively unfettered seeing that he/she is already living the PCE and has no emotional self anymore that has to go into abeyance. But due to social identity issues one ‘forgets’ one is already the embodiment of purity and innocence in a way. That’s my experience currently. One thing that remains startlingly evident though, is that an entire stratum of experience has permanently gone for me i.e. the feeling stratum, Being, my weighty centre of gravity for most of my life. And this is clear even when there is the occasional diminishment in my access to actuality, the occasional setback or when I’m not at 100% apperception.

The above may be confusing. I don’t think its possible to fully appreciate this curious situation above until one is basically free – otherwise one makes the mistake of equating different levels that look superficially similar e.g. ‘Srinath can be affected by the vagaries of life and so can I, we are the same!’ – sort of logic. I know that I was prone to those sorts of conclusions on meeting actually free people too prior to AF.

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Wow this is fascinating thanks for sharing @Srinath. As you say it’s pretty difficult to understand your experiencing without the experience of living in actual freedom myself.

It’s really fascinating to me what you write about the social identity clouding your experiencing to a level that at times can be not quite as pristine as the PCE (if I understood you correctly).

Actually it’s kind of refreshing :smiley: It makes it seems somewhat more doable haha.

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And I’m surprised you’re surprised :slightly_smiling_face: I and others have been talking about this for a few years now - at least since the time of that Vineeto reply to Alan. But I guess it isn’t something that comes up often so fair enough. Bears repeating then perhaps.

Tbh I’m not sure how useful or useless this info. is prior to self-immolation. But I did want to try and clarify matters. The danger is that you’re left to imagine what it’s like to be basically or fully free from your vantage point of a feeling being. You’re better off simply staying with your own experience. This doesn’t change the process of self-immolation in any way.

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Indeed! You can’t do anything about the events in your life having ups and downs. You don’t have total ultimate control over your circumstances. But you will come to see that you do always have a choice how you react to or feel about life’s ups and downs.

Sounds like there’s a lot more space given to Free Will with AF as opposed to advaita, or neuroscience.

This is one of the key revolutionary paradigm-shifting aspects of actualism – you see that it is always your choice, and your choice alone, how you experience being alive. You can’t control that someone cuts you off in traffic – but you can choose whether to get upset about this, or whether to not let it diminsh even the tiniest bit from your enjoyment of being alive.

React vs respond.

This is really difficult to grasp and see that this is how it is in its totality. It took me many years! But it should be easy to see that you at least have somewhat of a choice. I always thought of it like comparing different people reacting to the same situation. Some people yell when they’re caught in traffic, or are sad when it rains – for others it doesn’t affect them at all (though other things do). So it’s easy to see it’s at least somewhat of a personal choice.

I tend to respond most of the time, just a couple of times in a week, or even a month that I might get irritable for a few seconds.

Sometimes carry emotions for a few hours, but much shorter now with resetting to present moment. Sure, have to be real vs supressing emotions.

As @Kub933 said, as a feeling-being only at most 99.9% has been reported haha. And not by anyone on this forum. Although I have personally experienced multiple days in a row at this 99.9% level!

So 99.9% of 86400 seconds (in a day) is 87 seconds out of ‘phase’.
99% would be 15 minutes out of phase in a day.

I’m at around 90-95% now which means 1-2 hours a day max ever so slightly out of phase. With 1-2 hours a week of annoyance, and 5-10 minutes a fortnight of externally visible irritability.

But when actually free it’s a different matter. But I can’t report on that from experience (yet).

You’re next in line (at least for basic freedom) from what my crystal ball tells me.

Indeed, an actually free person cannot feel bad, because the entity that would be feeling bad – the feeling-being – which is who ‘you’ think and feel ‘yourself’ to be – is gone entirely.

This is a game changer for me, because my current reality tells me that even fully enlightened beings suffering from a degree of anxiety like Ramana Maharishi worrying about his daughter managing after his death.

But it looks like after the complete self immolation pop that happens, the feeling being completely disappears.

Feelings can temporarily come in through the backdoor with decades of social and cultural conditioning, but the prison doors are clearly open and one can walk back out at any time.

But when it’s put this way it’s common to immediately imagine actually free people as robots or zombies. Nothing is further from the truth. It’s just impossible to imagine that “bad” things happening in one’s life wouldn’t take away from one’s experience of the perfection and purity of the universe. The only way to really see this is to have a PCE for yourself.

I’m feeling confident about getting to self immolation, if only someone could tell me how. But not so confident about the PCE bit.

Also note that when actually free you don’t “feel” good, per se. The entire affective faculty is gone along with the ‘self’ and the ‘Self’. But it’s not that it leaves a ‘hole’ in its place, an empty void. Rather it’s the other way around – there is a seamless whole and perfect exquisite experience of being alive (as I have seen in my PCEs) and you see that emotions (including felicitous ones) are what was the ‘hole’ in the first place. Or rather it’s more accurate to say that ‘I’ the feeling-being ‘myself’ was the hole. It’s just that the way ‘I’ as a feeling-being experience being alive is via emotions. There’s no distinction between ‘me’ and ‘my’ emotions – they are one and the same thing. This ‘me’ is what is the hole.

Thanks this is helpful.

Haha these things can be nuanced and tricky. It’s not that “dealing with negative emotions” isn’t a significant part of the process – it certainly can be (the extent to which it is is basically the extent to which you experience negative emotions) – but rather that it’s silly to fear them. Fearing them does not do anything productive. It just adds fear on top of the negative emotion already. Rather it’s about simply letting yourself become aware of them (i.e. not fearing them, not hiding from them, etc…) so that such awareness can lead you back to feeling good (because it’s better to feel good than to feel bad).

Now getting the idea that finding a way to handle or process negative emotions or triggers is a necessary step in the sell immolation and feeling being dissolution process.

That being said, if you take a look at the flowchart again you’ll see that you’ve cherry-picked only half the equation.

You’re right I have. I thought this insecure fear of negative emotions (I was wrong as usual), but completely ignored this chase for feeling good all the time. Because I dont give a fuck about feeling good because I take feeling good pretty much every single minute of every day for granted (okay at least 90-95%).

From the flow-chart there is a ‘trigger’ arrow:

image

And you will see that what the ‘trigger’ arrow leads to, when not enjoyment and appreciation, is:

image

i.e. ‘negative emotions’ are only (an equal) half of the equation. The other half are the ‘positive emotions’. So it seems by your words you reveal that you have a bias regarding the negative emotions, as that’s the only thing that you saw when looking at this :wink: .

Yep, bias towards negative feelings, because it seemed to me like people were focused on reducing them, but also felt to be to equally focus on feeling good. But I see there’s a distinction - there’s bad feelings, and good feelings, both of which can be counterproductive and the goal is to work to neutral, or feeling good and PCE’s.

Aye of course. That’s normal. It would be strange if your current reality already was feeling good all of the time.

But that’s where actualism comes in. You see that it’s possible – to at least feel significantly good for 99% of the time – and you can make changes in your life to make it happen. It’s really just a question of whether that’s appealing for you, and if so, the decision to start doing it.

Time to jump from 90-95% to 99%.

From the examples you gave:

  • why be unkind to someone in the first place if it diminishes feeling good? And if you have to be “unkind” (eg they are being unreasonable and you have to assert your interests) then why let that necessary course of action take away from feeling good?

One person in their replies to me wasn’t happy and harmless. I felt an inclination to ‘put him in his place’ or as Srinath and my old friends called it ‘bub giving someone a ‘dose’’. Then I read their journals, felt bad for their traumatic upbringing and decided not to reply. Ended up composing a peaceful reply I can still put on. But didn’t want to ‘feed the troll’ as I didn’t think he would offer anything of value but further drama even in response to a peaceful reply.

Even writing the above makes me think oh, now he will see this and reply and come up with drama. And I’m a bit fearful I will give him a ‘dose’. But will ignore any response, least I get drawn into to and fro’s.

It’s the one kind of person at work I cant get along with - can get along with rude people who make sense, kind people who dont make sense, but the rude, senseless peeps who are incapable of a civil response to a civil response my only solution is ignore. I feel the ‘dosing’ bub is 95-99% gone.

I guess the only times I’m very rarely unkind and it’s usually around being a people pleaser, and not being able to give them what they want, them being unhappy at this, and me being unhappy at this that tends to make me snap at them. Again 1-2 times a week or month. More frequent if I’m not exercising or doing what needs to get done.

  • why let your feeling good depend on whether your significant other rejects you?

I’m a people pleaser, and seeing a partner unhappy with me makes me feel bad. I’m happy in my own skin yes, but feel my mood affected if others even strangers reject me.

If a friend of years decides to stop speaking to me, I will feel sad.

I’m hoping loss of feeling being or not, Srinath would be sad or at least miss me if my sorry mug wasnt in his life.

  • why let your feeling good depend on whether a beautiful stranger rejects you? Isn’t it sill to hand over the reigns of your emotional state over to beautiful strangers?

This makes sense - but I’m allowing myself to feel the disappoinment from the rejection to learn the lesson to do a bit better the next time. No more than an hour or two of disappointment for a great prospect. Less than a second for someone I could care less about.

Then we get into repression and spiritual bypassing - there has to be a healthy way to deal with emotions even if it’s past is as good as not having happened, that self who felt bad doesnt even exist and is programmed to cause all manner of drama, get back in the Now.

I think it’s better to think of it as maximizing feeling good as much as possible, rather than going for 100%. It is always easy to see the next step of how it can be better – rather than trying to live up to a perfect ideal from the start.
That being said it’s not 100% or even 99% for me, but it’s really quite good. At least recently, feeling good has been normal, with dips below it being less common than not, and I clearly see them, they are separated from each other (they don’t all glom together into one ‘oh god this is all awful’), and I can get back to feeling good pretty quickly.
I find for me it goes in periods though. There are periods like this then periods of feeling bad for days in a row. But on a high level looking over the past few years, there is a clear and constant upward trend.

Thanks for the pointer to prioritise feeling good as much as possible versus a percentage tally.

Talk with Srinath more :smiley: . Also if you were able to get under his skin many years ago but haven’t been able to for a few years, that’s something interesting isn’t it?

Ahh, I have a spectacular talent for being annoying. I’d put money on being able to get a rise out of Srinath - loss of feeing being or not. Though for the first time in my life, I’m not confident I’d win that wager.

I’m not going to do it, so lets stick with, okay, Srinath has lost his feeling being and I wont be able to annoy him as I used to.

Peaceful is one thing… but what about actively enjoyable?

Pretty peaceful is a phrase I use often. Actively enjoying is my default state.

The PCE is great because it shows you how it can be, and what to aim for. That being said it isn’t so hard to take joy from conditionally enjoyable things is it? That’s how most people live their lives :smiley: . Enjoying the good things but not enjoying the bad things… It seems silly to try to make yourself enjoy some conditional thing that is objectively bad. If you stub your toe, it hurts, it’s silly to try to force yourself to enjoy the stubbing-of-the-toe per se. But if you think of it as, ok, I stubbed my toe, and it hurts, but is it worth feeling upset over it on top of experiencing this physical pain? No? Ok! Then you stub your toe without feeling upset about it :slight_smile:

Basically use conditional and unconditional to feel delight, but dont get hooked onto them having to be present.

Quite the contrary! That’s not the way to get to a PCE. If you are concentrating or squeezing then you’re going in the wrong direction. This is very critical cause doing this can lead you to an ASC (Altered State of Consciousness) which can superficially sound like the PCE in terms of sensate-only experience, but really the critical component - ‘you’ - are still there in the background. It can be hard to separate the ASCs out from the PCEs at first especially coming from a spiritual background.

The key is that it’s more about feeling good rather than experiencing the senses. If you are feeling good, you’re on the way to the PCE. If you’re feeling great, you’re even closer… if you are simply wondering and marveling at being alive on this verdant paradisical planet, then you are really close! Etc. It’s about how ‘you’ are, not about what senses you experience.

I can feel balls to the wall fantastic on tap. But I have a feeling no matter what i say, it’s not going to approximate the fixed definition of a PCE. That’s okay. I just have to objectively get there and be sure of what it is in the first place, and only way to get there is by actually getting there, and that experience being legitimately validated and not handed out for anything less than a clear PCE.

[> quote=“bub, post:7, topic:768”]

Does physical universe mean I have to immerse myself in the environment around me and appreciate it keep getting that PCE experience, till it’s an almost constant OR possible to feel PCE by just feeling good, and that can be built on.
[/quote]
It should be clear from what I just wrote above, but it’s the latter.

jamesjjoo put up a quote saying it’s the former. But happy to go with either. Basically feel good and tailor that towards PCE state.

Indeed, that’s what I wrote too - “ego-self may be gone” (i.e. “completely unrelated to a egoic self” – since this egoic self is gone) – but “soul-self is still there”. It’s this soul-self that is this awareness you speak of. The soul underlies the ego, comes before it. The ego is built on top of the soul. The soul is the material from which the ego is built. The soul is the seat of the psyche, the seat of ‘your’ emotions. It is who ‘you’ are at the core of ‘your’ ‘being’. This soul is this Awareness, ultimately.

Okay, so this is why people post enlightenment are still attached to feeling beings despite ego dissolution. Theres still the soul/awareness that brings up feelings and emotions.

Yea! The amazing thing will be to watch this unconditional unchanging Awareness that can be accessed at any time, completely disappear along with that which was experiencing it, as you enter a PCE :smiley: .

Looking forward to popping that PCE cherry. :woman_cartwheeling:

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Hi @bub and welcome!

Though this isn’t a popular vote (and you seem fully capable of figuring this out yourself) I’ll add my 2 cents to it being the latter as well.

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