Chrono's Journal

[cross.chrono]

Although it was last week, I wanted to write this wonderful experience I had before I forget. I had just gone for a walk in the park and was driving back home when I noticed the sky spontaneously. The sky showed up almost as if I had never seen it before and I became aware of being alive on this planet. And I mean this planet that is happening right now that everyone is alive in. I became aware of how everything was being provided for already. This planet had set itself up in such a way that we are here alive and aware of it. There was a complete friendliness to being alive. It was all happening right now all at once. I became aware of the cars around me and it was a marvel in that it had all arranged itself in a way that people could get to where they need to go easily. The most stand out feature again of all this was that it was all happening on its own without ‘me’. It has always been like this. Then it occurred to me that I too am happening on my own. I am a part of this planet, this universe. Just as it’s all happening on its own. It is not coming from or going somewhere. And I became perplexed afterwards. ‘I’ am such a strange occurrence. Almost like someone that shouldn’t be there but am there. An entire reality ..somewhere else. What exactly sustains ‘me’?

Then after two more days, I started thinking on this experience at work again. Everything is already here so there was no need to “rush” anywhere. I sometimes have a feeling of finishing things fast or trying to “speed up” time to do the things I didn’t want to do quickly. I started experiencing it again and it led to an effortless feeling good. I am almost inclined to say that it is the source and reason for all feeling felicitous and innocuous. It led to feeling this way for almost the entire day. Then yesterday as I was looking at a wallpaper of the “Hubble Deep Field” and was reflecting again on how all of this was also happening on its own. So many myriad galaxies forming and rearranging all on their own, I noticed another stand out feature of this experiencing being not of ‘me’. This infinitude was not for any one person but for every person that is alive. Everyone is swimming in this bounty already. My partner actually saw me during this experiencing and commented at how my expression was “most contented”.

I am becoming more aware of underlying feelings that I am being that are not in alignment with what this experience shows. A common feeling that I notice now in many of the issues that I wrote about is the deep feeling of being trapped. So I instinctually and unwittingly have been chasing the ‘feeling of being free’. Which feeling of being free is always somewhere else and is being sustained by the feeling of being trapped. That is, there is a belief that freedom is somewhere and somewhen else. I’ve noticed this before when some form of feeling very good and some closeness starts to happen. I’ll start getting feelings of nostalgia and the closeness then is to be gotten somewhere else.

@Vineeto

Given you raised the topic of “on the road to being insane and abnormal” – I highly recommend Richard’s two Selected Correspondences on Sanity, Insanity and the Third Alternative (whichever excerpts tickle your fancy). This correspondence of what sanity really is was a genuine eye-opener for ‘Vineeto’, and it took ‘her’ a while to digest how much “sanity is the problem and insanity is not the solution” –

Hi Vineeto,

I have been reading this correspondence and reflecting. It’s clear from the real-world perspective that anything other than sanity is insanity. But to remain sane is to leave things as they are. This being the case as nowhere and nowhen has there been genuine peace. The sane thing to do also seems to be to simply pay lip service to peace and harmony and leave it as an ideal to attain but never achieve. The insidious part of sanity is the denial of what being sane entails. What is dawning on me at the moment is that to evince peace and harmony would be to leave the felt “safety” of being sane (which is felt to be insanity) behind. But I am not entirely familiar with insanity as a way of being as in (bold emphasis added):

RICHARD: No, what I mean by ‘sanity’ is the ordinary, normal, common, or everyday state of being sane, being of sound mind or in one’s right mind, or being in possession of one’s faculties, and not being in a state of mind that precludes normal perception and behaviour and which prevents ordinary social interaction (to be insane is to be suffering from psychosis, a severe mental illness, a derangement, a disorder, that involves a loss of contact with reality and is often marked by delusions, hallucinations, and altered thought processes).

I think the closest I would say is being in love or when I took a psychedelic substance once. But I can see that insanity seems to be a difference in degree to sanity rather than kind. So perhaps just as “being in love” is sane so it is when it’s taken all the way to the extreme to enlightenment. But I do see how much sanity is the problem.

@Vineeto

Well observed. When you say “how I wanted her to receive my thoughts” you would understand that she instinctually wants the same thing – so when you, for instance, stand back a while and allow her to express her thoughts and her feelings, there is a good chance she will want to understand yours. Your fear of “being uncaring” is responsible for needing to convince her that you are not uncaring (via having your thoughts received, rather than acting in a caring way such as listening attentively, for instance).

Ah actually your pointing this out helped me to notice it. My fear of being uncaring is what causes a lot of the suffering for me. What I realize now as I am typing this is that underlying the thought of abandoning compassion is the feeling that I will go insane. As in become a sociopath. But I am now swinging to the opposite. So what would it mean to abandon both? I cannot imagine it.

@Vineeto

Before you hone into compassion as one option, did you notice that looking at the ‘good’ feelings, you might be invested in, gives a whole new perspective to your negative feelings of “resentment, indignation, obedience”? There are always two sides to one’s persistent negative feelings and mostly one’s personal investment into the hedonically pleasant side of them is overlooked.

Yes I am getting the hang of looking for the positive feelings that I am invested in any time I am persistently feeling negative.

@Vineeto

Yes, it sounds very exhausting what you were practicing, and in the long run it is ineffective because both sympathy and compassion literally means ‘suffering together’. Did you notice that both “being a ‘Saviour’” and releasing of the (imagined or real) charge of being uncaring are part of your actions?

I did connect the dots after you pointed it out. The good feelings of “being a Saviour” are created to counter the bad feelings of “the charge of being uncaring”.

@Vineeto

Empathetic caring is a different matter (empathy meaning ‘in-feeling’) –

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 – although not named as such back then, of course, nor thought of in those terms – 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. (Richard, List D, Srinath2, #near-actual-intimacy)

By the way, Richard was accused many times of not caring (FFM, Actualists Don’t Care).

To some extent, I had been lumping all feeling caring such as sympathetic caring, compassionate caring, empathetic caring, etc as the same thing, but it makes sense to note the differences and seeing how empathetic caring plays a part til the end. Also interesting seeing that correspondence of people accusing Richard of not being caring when everything he’s done has been an actual caring in action. What it highlights for me is how actual caring is not guided by what others feel. In contrast to feeling caring, which seems to be all about affirming and endorsing ‘me’ (self-centred). Which further highlights that there’s really only one action that ‘I’ can do which would be the closest to actual caring.

@Vineeto

Now that you mentioned the “Saviour” twice, and having to avoid being accused of being selfish, uncaring, callous several times – isn’t it time to investigate the root of the problem – the worry about being selfish and uncaring – rather than activate compassion which you already know does nothing to alleviate the suffering?

The traditional cure to being selfish is to put the other before oneself – in other words, only seeing the dichotomy of being ‘selfish’ and being compassionate/unselfish as a choice. Actualism is about becoming less ‘self’-centric (less ego-centric or soul-centric), with the implicit understanding that it is the ‘self’ which is the problem, both in its selfish or its unselfish expression. For instance –

MARTIN: ‘I’ can only think in terms of ‘self’ and ‘other’, where ‘I’ am either selfish or virtuously selfless (which I experience as simply being a re-direction of that narcissistic energy). I don’t think I’ve really understood what harmless means, as I can’t help but either put ‘myself’ or ‘others’ first (as a kind of denial of ‘self’) when I think of being harmless. When I think of “for that body and every body” I can’t help thinking of and instinctually feeling “for that ‘self’ and every ‘self’”! ‘Harmlessness’ feels like something you do to another human being – or an effect you have on them – but do you simply mean it as an absence of malice and sorrow?
RICHARD: The word harmless, in actualism lingo, refers to the innocuity which ensues in the absence of malice (just as the word happiness refers to the felicity which ensues in the absence of sorrow).
And it is only in either a PCE (where the feeling-being is abeyant) or upon an actual freedom (where the feeling-being is extinct) that there is a total absence of malice and sorrow.
In the meanwhile, of course, both malice and sorrow (the ‘bad’ feelings) can be deliberately minimised – along with their antidotal pacifiers love and compassion (the ‘good’ feelings) – so as to consciously maximise those happy and harmless feelings (the ‘congenial’ feelings) and with all of that affective energy, which was otherwise frittered away on those wasteful ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings, now freed-up and channelled into felicity and innocuity a potent combination is forged when such untrammelled conviviality operates in conjunction with a naïve sensuosity.
*
Do you see how almost all of that paragraph you wrote as a lead-up to your query about being harmless – as in “but do you simply mean it as an absence of malice and sorrow?” that is – stems from or revolves around that hoary religio-spiritual practice of putting each and every other ‘self’ before one’s own ‘self’ (a.k.a. being an unselfish ‘self’) so as to counter selfishness?
Yet the topic on the web page which Claudiu linked to ( Richard, Audiotaped Dialogues, Putting the Other before Oneself). is essentially about being self-centred – with especial attention upon that term referring to each and every ‘self’ being both ego-centric and soul-centric – and not about being selfish.
As being harmless does not feature in religio-spiritual practice – peace-on-earth is not on the religio-spiritual agenda – then the sooner that nonsense about being an unselfish ‘self’ is abandoned the better.
Here is another reason why:
• [Richard]: “(…). Further to the point: what is intelligent about advocating pacifism, for example, which would not only enable the bully boys and feisty femmes to rule the world, with all which inheres in that, but would also propagate/ perpetuate their kind unto future generations per favour the dutiful martyrdom (and thus a willing removal from the human gene-pool) of those seeking instant release into the hereafter of their choice through gullible practise of same?
And just in case the latter is not clear enough: if every otherwise intelligent non-dictatorial/ non-bandit/ non-criminal/ non-rapacious/ non-pillaging type of person were to actually put into practice, as a world-wide reality, those unliveable doctrines which bodiless deities prescribe then in a remarkably short period of time all babies will be being born with bully boys and feisty femmes as parents … and with no alternate care-giver/ role-model anywhere to be found.
So much for ‘suffer the little children to come unto me’, eh?” (Richard, AF List, No. 25h, 13 May 2005).
MARTIN: What is harmlessness in an unconditional sense? Obviously it can’t be dependent on others at all.
RICHARD: As to be actually harmless – which is surely what “harmlessness in an unconditional sense” means – is to be actually free of malice (as distinct from being virtually malice-free) then any listing of what it “can’t be dependent on” is irrelevant, as all what being actually harmless is dependent upon is being actually free of malice.
Incidentally, as malice can be (and often is) self-directed – feeling-beings are notorious for self-harm – then to focus solely on others for your “Obviously…” conclusion is to be ignoring half the picture. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List D, Martin, 2 Aug 2016).

And because this concern of yours is so persistent, there might be an additional sticking point – the issue of belonging, perhaps?

I can see that if I look at the root of the problem - worry about being selfish and uncaring - then the underlying feelings are I will go insane and simultaneously lose all connection to Humanity. And the thought goes something like, “if I lose the connection to Humanity, then how can I care for them (while also receiving the reward of good feelings for that caring)?”. I am reminded of something my dad often said to me if I were to talk of these types of matters with him. It goes something like, ‘oh you think you know better than the billions of people that are alive right now?’. Which lesson I presume he wanted to impress on me was to humble myself. And which lesson seems to have worked because in being humbled, I am staying in line and being obedient. As opposed to going out of line and lashing out in some way.

@Vineeto

This story is about an older feeling being giving practical advice to child how to deal with an unwanted workload, there is nothing more mysterious about it. However, a lot of adults keep dragging out unpleasant tasks instead of ‘getting to it’.

Then it is quite apt as I’ve been putting off working on my taxes for a bit too long haha. Procrastination only keeps the negative feelings at bay for a bit. And things have to get done irregardless how I feel about it. But better to feel good while doing it.

@Vineeto

This is an excellent discovery. Being aware of unpleasant vibes helps a lot not to be drawn in to the psychic battle and you keep on feeling good without having to respond in kind. When you inadvertently get drawn in, there is most like a ‘hook’ on your side and you can ferret out your own reason for any affective involvement.

Sometimes there is a compelling nature in the drawing of these battles. There is a whole power or pull of Humanity underlying psychic battles. Framed as either right or wrong, good or bad. ‘How dare I not participate in the battle?’. Yes, the sane thing to do is to participate and take a side.

@Vineeto

It is unfortunate that it being a moving image and not just text, it had far more impact on you than such an improbably fantasy deserves. You better cast this image of how insults are absorbed out of your mind. Fact is that once you have the intent of not responding automatically to insults and slights, you actually root out the cause for feeling insulted from your own psyche, such as a certain self-image, pride, ideas what a man should do and similar concepts.

Your comment made me think about how much imagination plays a part in sustaining ‘me’. Imagining and ‘me’ seem to go hand in hand. It seems to be the very substance of ‘me’.

@Vineeto

Simply by your intent to be happy and harmless and to keep feeling good. It’s a different value to the ‘battle’ of right and wrong, superior/ inferior others want to draw you into. In other words, you play a different game altogether.

Yes I am noticing that it is an entirely different value. Completely different from ‘me’. I cannot keep one part of ‘me’ while trying to eliminate the other part. It’s the entirety of ‘me’. All of ‘reality’.

There was something else that I was wanting to write but I will have to get to it next time.