Alexander: Yes. Resentment is something I look at a lot because I have a lot of it. I don’t feel it towards religious people anymore for the reasons you laid out, namely that we are all in the grip of instinctual passions.
Hi Alexander,
So now that you know how to drop resentment for one issue, by the same means it is easy to drop any other resentment each time you become aware of one. It is immensely liberating to take charge of your life in that you don’t blame other people and outside events to how you feel.
Alexander: I even think Christianity keeps some people in line to a degree. And I have fond memories of church as well. The communal feelings I shared with people doing their best to live a ‘good’ life.
It is the widespread “truth” that good can conquer evil if one only tries hard enough. This has been tried (and failed) for centuries, millennia in fact, and yet the prevalence of misery and mayhem is still the same. The reason is that good and evil are two sides of the same coin and both arise out of the instinctual animal passions – fear and aggression, nurture and desire.
Alexander: One thing I’m not sure I understand from the above quote where Richard asks “Can I emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable?” Is he recommending emotional acceptance? What does that look like? To be happy and harmless come what may?
Only yesterday I wrote to Chrono about this question –
Chrono: Or also to put another way, how can I emotionally accept the suffering of humanity (I am assuming this is what is meant in the ‘how can I emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable?’)?
Vineeto: Emotionally accepting means to give up resenting that it’s happening or blaming others for it happening when/ if you can acknowledge that everyone (of no fault of their own) is inflicted with the same instinctual passions as you are. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Chrono, 10 Jul 2025)
You see, you are already on the right track with giving up resentment in one area. Now apply the same tool the moment you become affectively aware that you blame someone/ something else for feeling bad and see how silly that is to spoil your only moment of being alive by feeling bad. Some people even blame the weather for feeling bad!
While it is silly to tolerate war, rape, murder, child abuse and domestic violence, for instance – it would be an insult to your own intelligence – it makes no sense to emotionally suffer that such events are happening due to the human condition. It would only add more suffering and anger with no beneficial outcome. Whereas when you are able to emotionally accept the intellectually unacceptable and succeed in feeling good, or even enjoy and appreciate being alive, you add enjoyment and appreciation for yourself and others (which is far more felicitous and beneficial than resentment).
Alexander: I think you are right about my resentment needing a target to blame. And maybe God is just a way of personifying a universe that I don’t emotionally accept. I once heard someone say “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him”. The instinctual self really is like a frightened animal.
When you become affectively aware of this fear again, instead of blaming it on a fictitious entity, stop rejecting/ fighting the fear and thus stop fuelling the affective energy. See if you can loosen the control a bit, allowing the fear to just be there and you will notice how it diminishes simply by not objecting to it. From there is only a hop and a jump to feeling ok/ feeling good, and then you can explore more closely what it is made of. It’s the automatic habit of rejection which makes it appear so big.
Richard: Usually the frightening aspect dominates and obscures the thrilling aspect: shifting one’s attention to the thrilling aspect (I often said jokingly that it is down at the bottom left-hand side) will increase the thrill and decrease the fright as the energy of fear shifts its focus and changes into a higher gear … and, as courage is sourced in the thrilling part of fear, the daring to proceed will intensify of its own accord.
But stay with the thrill, by being the thrill, else the fright takes over, daring dissipates, and back out of the corner you come. (Richard, List B, James3, 7 November 2002).
Alexander: For the most part I don’t think about my negative experiences with religion but I get emotionally triggered when people bring it up. But I’m not combative with people the way I once was. The people who indoctrinated me were themselves indoctrinated.
It seems even though you generally don’t like resenting religion, hearing about still triggers a negative habitual reaction. It takes diligent attentiveness with the sincere intent to become free from that habitual reaction (in order to be more happy and harmless), to recognize it happening and then replace it instead with delighting in being alive in this only moment you can actually experience.
Alexander: This is off topic but I can’t find a post you made that I read recently where you were quoting Richard about infinitude. I always found the idea that you could experience infinitude perplexing but the quote you used made it much clearer. He was saying how everywhere is anywhere and anywhere is everywhere. And how stillness is the essential character of the universe. If you could share that again I would appreciate it.
Perhaps this is the correspondence you are looking for (Henry, 1 June 2025) – in any case it gives a detailed explanation regarding infinitude –
Henry: As I watched closely the void evaporated leaving me simply where I was, in the dim midnight light of my house. I could see that my posturing was just a way of ‘building myself up’ to avoid the void, but here there was no need to leave – everything is already here.
Vineeto: This is an excellent report of what exquisite awareness-cum-attentiveness can do – the “void” that at first felt “threatening” transformed into “everything is already here”. This feeling of the “void” can happen in many nuances and situations – a ‘lull’, boredom, not knowing what is going to happen next, feeling foolish when an old pattern is seen as no longer applicable. This is the door to naiveté and can, as in your report, lead to the full realisation that nothing needs to change because “everything is already here”.
Perhaps you even experienced that you are already here, in this eternal moment of now, the only moment you can actually experience.
This excerpt of a correspondence might give you even more (experiential) insight about “everything is already here” –
Claudiu: […]. Another related thing I’m not sure of is from the transcript of one of the audio taped dialogues.
On a phone now so no link handy. But Richard was saying how the nature of infinitude is that it is always here and now. Thus to be here now is to be everywhere at once. I’m not sure what to make of this ‘everywhere’. China for example is pretty far away so how can I be in China if I am here? It makes sense that on the way to china I would also be here. But not that everywhere at once includes china right now. This train of thought already seems silly as I’m typing it out but I’m left without an answer. Ah well! Something to reflect on next PCE. […].
Richard: G’day Claudiu, You are, presumably, referring to this:
• [Richard]: ‘The actual experience of the infinitude of space and time is to be ‘everywhere all at once’, because all time and all space are right here … and right now. There is nowhere else but here and no time but now. Anywhere is everywhere and everywhere is anywhere’. (Richard, Audio-Taped Dialogues, Infinitude is the Boundlessness).
It is better explained in ‘Richard’s Journal’. Viz.:
• [Richard]: ‘The purity of life emerges from the perfection that wells up constantly due to a vast stillness which is utterly immense in its scope and magnitude. This stillness of infinitude is that something which is precious. It is the life-giving foundation of all that is apparent. This stillness happens as me. This stillness is my essential disposition, for it is the principle character, the intrinsic basis of everything. It is this universe at its genesis. It is not, as it might commonly be supposed, at the centre of everything … there is no centre here. This stillness, which is everywhere all at once, is the be all and end all of life itself. I am the universe experiencing itself as a sensate, reflective human being’. (pp. 179-180, ‘Richard’s Journal’, ©2004, ‘Peace-On-Earth Is Not The Be All And End All Of Life’).
Thus if you think of it, initially, as the vast stillness which is ‘everywhere all at once’ (as in, there is no centre to physical infinitude) then, when following a train of thought about the audio-taped dialogue regarding the actual experiencing of that vast stillness – where matter-as-energy is the source of everything apparent (i.e., matter-as-mass) – as being a flesh-and-blood body’s essential disposition it will make more sense. (Richard, List D, Claudiu2, 28 May 2013).
Alexander: And I was wondering if infinitude was something you experienced as soon as you became actually free or if it happened when you became fully free? (link)
From ‘Vineeto’s’ PCEs I knew that the universe is infinite in space and eternal in time. However, to experience this in its full extent I had to lose a few more boundaries in consciousness in order to experience the full extent of this infinite and eternal universe. I have written about it in “From Basic Freedom to Full Actual Freedom”.
Cheers Vineeto