Chrono: I have been able to much more easily and consistently feel good since my last post. There is this intertwining of closeness and sweetness. It’s always readily here and sometimes it’s like ‘I’ am close to this quality and “bathing” in its rays with varying degrees from feeling good to excellent. I have an increased confidence that I did not have before. Although I experience it as a choice that I have to consistently make. But what is more clear is that it is ‘I’ that is away from this. Everything that ‘I’ do takes me away from this. It’s so very clear that ‘I’ can never be here. ‘My’ very nature is that of being away from this moment.
Hi Chrono,
What an excellent report that you are able to see it so clearly – and from there to know exactly what to do.
Chrono: Now when I look at a feeling I try to see if I really want to feel that feeling. I ask myself if it feels good and the feeling may morph and shift into a different feeling to avoid facing it. ‘I’ am being seen each moment. The more I’ve done this, I see that every feeling other than feeling good sucks. And even further to that, I only genuinely like myself when I am feeling good.
Ha, when you see – and know with certainty – “that every feeling other than feeling good sucks” then you know you have dedicated your life to being happy and harmless. And further to that you may well have opened the door to being naïve because this is what happens when you genuinely like yourself – and like your fellow human beings as a natural corollary –
Richard: To be naïveté itself (i.e., naïveté embodied as a childlike persona with adult sensibilities), which is to be the closest one can to innocence whilst remaining a ‘self’ (innocence is where ‘self’ is not), one is both likeable and liking for herewith lies tenderness and/or sweetness and togetherness and/or closeness whereupon moment-to-moment experiencing is of traipsing through the world about in a state of wide-eyed wonder and amazement as if a child again (guileless, artless, ingenuous, innocuous) – yet with adult sensibilities whereby the distinction betwixt being naïve and being gullible is readily separable – simply marvelling at the sheer magnificence of this oh-so-material universe’s absoluteness and unabashedly delighting in its boundless beneficence, its limitless largesse, as being the experiencing is inherently cornucopian (due to the near-absence of agency which ensues when the controlling doer is abeyant and the naïve beer is ascendant), with a blitheness and a gaiety such that the likelihood of the magical fairy-tale-like nature of this paradisaical terraqueous globe, this bounteously verdant and azure planet, becoming ever-so-sweetly apparent, as an experiential actuality, is almost always imminent. (Richard, Abditorium, Innocence, #Naïveté)
Chrono: Relatedly, I was wondering today what it means to actually care for someone. After reading thru some articles on the AFT website it’s clear that I have never actually cared ever before.
I can relate very well to that realisation of yours as ‘Vineeto’ had a similar experience –
Richard: Hence it came to pass one fine evening that feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ realised, with a profound visceral impact, how ‘she’ had never actually cared – although ‘she’ certainly felt caring (in fact ‘she’ had a deeply-ingrained and ongoing feeling of caring about all the misery and mayhem) – and upon that realisation transforming itself into an actualisation (as per the intimacy-yearning process detailed in the ‘Direct Route Mail-Out № 05 email part-quoted at the top of this page) it activated “a caring which is as close to an actual caring as an identity can muster” and there was indeed action which was not of ‘her’ doing … to wit: the ending of ‘her’ and all ‘her’ subterfuge and trickery (just to stay in keeping with the above wording purely for effect). (Richard, List D, Srinath2, 6 Aug 2016).
Chrono: To put someone before oneself or to experience compassion for them is what it has meant in the ‘real world’ to care for another. But to actually care for someone else, it’s to actually free them from the burden of ‘me’. Thus to free this body of ‘me’ is the best that I can do for them.
It is very helpful to rule out putting “someone before oneself or to experience compassion” so as not to fall into the trap of compassion or trying to be ‘selfless’, whereas a deep near-actual-caring, which is not self-centric, is what will facilitate the powerful instinct of altruism to overcome the powerful instinct of self-survival. Richard reports about ‘his’ experience during ‘his’ virtual freedom –
Richard: Now, as the identity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body all those years ago was in an out-from-control virtual freedom for something like five months (…) I can readily report how ‘he’ was more empathetic during that period than ‘he’ ever had been in all ‘his’ 34 years of existence. So much so, in fact, that I would be inclined to characterise a near-actual caring as an acutely-empathic caring.
This acutely-empathic characteristic of the near-actual caring which prevails in the out-from-control way of being is, by virtue of not being self-centred/ self-centric, universal in its scope. (Richard, List D, Srinath2, 13 Aug 2016).
Chrono: I can see now that to truly care even for myself that I have to first genuinely like myself (and others). Let’s see how far this aim will go! (link)
Yes, when you genuinely like yourself and therefore care for yourself (this body), and by extension for that body and every body with all your ‘being’, “this aim” can carry you all the way.
Cheers Vineeto
PS: Unless you already found it, the selected correspondence on Near-actual Caring is quite comprehensive.