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.
Hi Chrono,
What splendid descriptions of “experiencing being not of ‘me’”. You had plenty of leisure to look around, so to speak, and draw some valuable conclusions, especially the observation that you have been looking for the source of feeling good – “experiencing being not of ‘me’” – somewhere other than here on earth and now, in this very moment.
And you also reported that when “some closeness starts to happen”, often a ‘good’ feeling, in this case “nostalgia” swoops in and diverts you from further exploring this “closeness”. It is exactly this fine-tuned attentiveness which allows you to detect such diversions sooner rather than later, before they gather solidity, and then get back to your original exploration.
Lastly, when you say “sustained by the feeling of being trapped” you are probably aware that you are trapping yourself and ‘I’ am playing a trick on ‘me’ pretending the trapping is happening by someone 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” –
Chrono: 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). (Richard, List B, No. 19 l, 15 Apr 2003)
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.
It was similar for ‘Vineeto’ – to realise that being sane meant for ‘her’ accepting all the wars, murder, child abuse and general violence as being ‘normal’, i.e. sane, and therefore not safe at all. ‘She’ also had little experience of what insanity means – once a close friend had a longer lasting psychotic experience and it was quite terrifying for ‘her’. Throughout the whole time of actualism the fear of going inadvertently insane remained a prevalent threat, and ‘her’ out-from-control episode was testimony to that –
Richard: The reason why the word inadvertently is apt is because that feeling ‘being’ – just as was the case with my second wife (de jure) many years previously – was not of sufficient qualification to be the direct-route pioneer essential for global peace and harmony; indeed, this inadvertent access was of an ‘innocent abroad’ nature, to use a popular expression, and the dilettante quality of such a privileged access – despite being complete, as it was, with the most perfect bodily touching (a physical caressing of absolute perfection) – led to their worldview-shattering discovery of my actual age (worldview-shattering only for ill-informed/ ill-prepared dabblers); this worldview-shattering shock of theirs, accompanied by much wide-eyed staring and the plaintive crying-out of the words ‘Two worlds!?! Two worlds!?!’ instigated the panic-stricken dash for (presumed) safety from an (assumed to be) insane man – as concluded from an amateurish ‘split-personality mental disorder’ diagnosis (based solely upon an automorphically ascribed adult personality who was, supposedly, co-existing with a ‘left behind’ teenager) – and the consequent mutiny as others were affectively-psychically sucked, willy-nilly, into a collective panic. (Actualism, Articles, Sweetness, #magic, [R]-tooltip)
So both your assessments that “insanity seems to be a difference in degree to sanity rather than kind” and that “how much sanity is the problem” are to the point and will stand you in good stead when encountering any altered states of consciousness or atavistic fears regarding sanity and insanity such as you detailed below.
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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).
Chrono: 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.
You have no need to “imagine it” – from the experience you described when “not being ‘me’” there were no concerns of being a “sociopath”, were there? As such you know as an experiential fact that minimising both ‘good’ and bad feelings, i.e. minimising ‘me’, is outside the range of sane and insane, it is being salubrious. This fact answers your question directly – “to abandon both” you become more and more salubrious.
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Chrono: 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”.
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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).
Chrono: 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 until the end.
For a feeling being all caring is accompanied by feelings, so a useful discernment would be to be less guided by what others expect you to do, or you yourself feel obligated to do, according to traditional beliefs and concepts, but instead be harmless, considerate and benevolent.
Chrono: 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.
Well said.
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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 – (snip quote 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?
Chrono: 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.
This underlying atavistic fear of “I will go insane and simultaneously lose all connection to Humanity” is universal, only varying in strength and expression. Those cast out from the tribe could not survive on their own. I remember ‘Vineeto’ once had strong fears of being condemned/ burnt as a witch if anyone found out what a traitor to the human condition ‘she’ was.
‘Vineeto’: The psychic world of divine and evil, with its atavistic feelings and psychic power structures, is not to be dismissed lightly. It is not a small thing we are doing, stepping out of ancient psychic history and leaving behind at least 3,500 years of recorded superstition and belief, hope for heaven and fear of hell. I encountered fears of being burnt as a witch, expelled from the tribe or starved to death – which in not so recent history were not just psychic imagined fears. These fears all seem to be woven as an ancient memory in our brain cells and are automatically triggered the moment one dares to steps out of the tribal, religious or social group one has belonged to.
Two things always helped me to overcome those fear-attacks – one was the obvious fact that feelings are not actual. Nobody is actually persecuting me or physically threatening me. The other thing is the understanding that I am deliberately and actively dismantling my very ‘self’, all of ‘who I think and feel I am’ and of course that will rock the boat, it wouldn’t be an actual change if it didn’t! Then, the journey becomes really thrilling … (Actualism, Vineeto, AF List, Gary, 3.8.2000).
Such feelings are all part and parcel of being a pioneer. However, for actualism to work you don’t have to openly rebel, or act inappropriately – you progressively cease believing in the various rules and concepts whilst paying lip service, when necessary, with the sincere intent to be more felicitous and innocuous. It’s only when there is still a belief, or doubt, on a particular subject, that the person feels compelled to publicly act out either the belief or demonstratively act out the opposite.
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Vineeto: It is unfortunate that it [Sponge-Bob] 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.
Chrono: 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’.
Yes, when you observe your feelings closely you will see that a lot of the feeling-created scenario in your mind is interwoven with imagined thoughts or action, and the more emotional you feel, the wilder the imagination progresses. They belong together –
Richard: All imagery is a product of the imaginative/ intuitive facility contained within the psyche – the affective faculty – born of the instinctual passions. When the instinctual passions are deleted, the entire psyche itself ceases to exist … thus the imaginative apparatus also disappears in toto. (Richard, AF List No. 10, 25 May 2000).
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Chrono: My question now is, if as a ‘being’, I am always involuntarily transmitting and receiving vibes and psychic currents, how can I as a ‘being’ have this affective and psychic attacking/ defending fall flat?
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.
Chrono: 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’. (link)
Specifically, you cannot keep the ‘good’ feelings, or what you value highly, such as pride, honour, virtue, belonging, whilst discarding the bad feelings. This does not work without suppression or hypocrisy.
And isn’t it a wonderful relief and joy when one portion of the inner push-and-pull battle has disappeared completely?
Cheers Vineeto