Also just want to emphasize here that the actual world isn’t some “consolation prize”, like oh the real world is where I gotta succeed but I can’t so I will “settle” for the actual world, tail between my legs. The actual world is the 1st place trophy! It just doesn’t seem that way when in the grips of the real world.
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@claudiu I would say yes to both your questions but more in principle than in practice. In my experience, especially when tackling these big, complex and ongoing emotional structures such as what @cross.chrono is describing, the process is more about slowly removing myself from those ‘real world dramas’ and aligning myself towards the third alternative as described in my post.
It has been rare that it would be as simple as any sorta A-B-C equation to remove something as big as my involvement in the ‘rat race’ for example.
If you notice in @cross.chrono post he mentions multiple beliefs, values, emotions etc all interwoven into this beast. I just don’t see it as feasible to break something as complex as this into a neat A-B-C sorta picture, with the more fundamental beliefs here and the more superficial here and with these 2 beliefs looping in a circle over here - and that the result of doing this would be the end of the drama as a whole.
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That is a spectacular post @Kub933
I think that it explains something very functional about investigating in a narrow but incomplete
way.
One doesn’t get far. It’s like Jenga, but with so many supports that it “fills” itself back in as if nothing is missing.
I like what @claudiu says, that there can be resolution of a loop, but I haven’t seen it yet.
What I am seeing though, is the “elephant in the room” issues. Things which are obvious, but we block them out.
The wisdom of the real world as sacrificial pawns.
Easy pickings which even the denizens of reality talk about.
The “rat race” is one of those. It’s a sacrificial lamb. The lizard tail. Everyone knows about it.
Yet, if it’s all so obvious, we should smell a rat.
Pardon the pun.
Is it really the issue? What is the third alternative?
Reality says “relax! Take a sea change!”
I don’t have the answer to the situation @cross.chrono
Society isn’t the problem. Neither is organising work structures. Profit isn’t the problem.
I don’t have the answer, but I think that Richard touches on something in this quote
R:. What is necessary to observe is all the little points. I used to have a young person come to see me, years ago, and she would listen to what I had to say, discuss things with me. Then she would come with a particular situation in her life – with her lover or the people she was sharing a house with – and tell me about that. Then she would ask me: ‘What do you think about that?’ Then I would obligingly consider the matter and say something relevant. Then she would go away and put it into practice … and it would very rarely work! What I had said to her made sense in the spirit of what was discussed at the time, so what was going wrong? This went on for about six months or so until she come to live with us for a while.
By living together one can not help but notice behaviour traits and I observed her in her daily life with her lover, with the other members of the household and with people who came to visit. Sure enough, we would end up sitting out on the verandah and having a chat about life, the universe and everything, as we were wont to do. She would eventually start in on telling me about a particular situation that happened, for example, that morning … and what did I think about that? I would listen to her telling me about a situation I had observed myself and I saw where I had been going wrong over the last six months. I would only get to hear her version of the story. I would then be able to say: ‘What about such-and-such, though?’ or ‘I heard you say something different to him than what you are telling me’. Or ‘You had a particular tone of voice when you said that to him’. Or ‘You had a certain attitude, a distinct stance, when you interacted there’. This is what is causing your problems; please, observe these important manners of interacting and reciprocating.
She eventually packed her bags and left, saying: ‘I’m being watched all the time! You are spying upon me!’ It was all rather lovely for she was following a certain spiritual teacher who made a big thing out of awareness … she would often want me to instruct her into the finer points of becoming aware – in the spiritual sense of the word, that is. It is one thing to discuss it, philosophically, and another to put it into practice in one’s daily life. One starts in on developing awareness by becoming conscious of the little tricks one gets up to … even with the shopkeeper, for instance. ‘Oh’, she would say, ‘is that awareness?’ Of course it is not, yet one starts where one can. The little points, each moment again. An unexamined life is second-rate living."
It’s easy to jump on the bandwagon. “Oh, the rat race!!! What a sham!!!”.
Yet, one could ask, why the potential intimacy of being so intricately involved with people, as in being a manager, within the structure of otherwise amazing human cooperation, isn’t being explored?"
I am not. I ran away from it.
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haha yes something like that!
This ties in with what @Kiman was struggling with.
Making a profit. Being a desirable mate.
What is it about being a savvy manager, someone capable and quick witted, which is incompatible with enjoying this moment? With being happy and harmless?
Aren’t we “jousting at windmills” here?
Otherwise discounting the very same things that the average feeling being will rail against?
I guess the main thing for me is that the resolution of persistent belief systems seems to happen more like an osmosis vs a light switch coming off or on. Reality is slowly outlined and purity is slowly moved towards. I see it more as a gradual movement vs a cutting down of beliefs through investigation.
In my opinion the times when beliefs are cut down immediately are the result of all the erosion that was done previously and not as a mechanism in its own right. Which I think is also why this can take a lot of time and persistence, one of the main reasons people give up with actualism. Could it be that our expectations of what the process should look like are a little skewed?
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I think the other thing that might be key here is what @Srinath mentioned here - Virtual Freedom vs. Rapid Method specifically the below bit regarding the ‘noise factor’ :
Reflecting on all of this my advice would still be the same. To focus on being happy and harmless each moment again, gradually separate purity from ‘you’, have EE’s and PCE’s galore, get a feeling of being as a totality and don’t overdo the investigation and attempt to eliminate social identity as it is quite tricky to do when one has feelings because of the noise factor.
I think the reason why investigations rarely tend to go down in a smooth A-B-C way is because of ‘me’. Whilst still a feeling being beliefs form the structure of ‘me’, they are how ‘I’ generate ‘my’ coherence. To remove a belief is to remove a part of ‘me’. This means that ‘I’ have to be ready for that belief to disappear, for that part of ‘me’ to disappear. ‘I’ need to see that it is safe and beneficial for this part to disappear, that there is something better (the third alternative), until this is seen ‘I’ will get up to all sorts of tricks to retain ‘my’ integrity as an identity. Which means even if all the beliefs are meticulously separated into this and that, they will still persist. Only when ‘I’ am ready for it to be exposed it will happen, hence why it is possible to present someone with all the facts regarding a situation and they will still perversely persist in their belief, we all know this feature.
So for as long as I am applying the method I am contending with the fact that there is an entire affective backing to each belief, and especially these vast belief systems form ‘my’ very world, ‘my’ life. So a lot of ticks have to be ticked before something as simple as a belief being seen through happens. Which is where feeling good and connection to purity (applying the method) comes in, by incrementally providing something better ‘I’ can safely begin to let go of these structures, but only when ‘I’ am ready.
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Skewed in my case, because I don’t have the contrast; well, I may have it, but I back down.
I am just riffing on the belief that not moving up the ladder of the company structure is somehow aligned with actualism.
If that was so, then any job consisting of high skill, potentially dangerous, excellent management, or highly specialised and demanding work would be incompatible with the perfection of an actually free world.
As if the hippie ideal of “dropping out” is synonymous with actualism.
If so, say goodbye to smartphones, affordable vehicles, clean running water, and everything in between.
Throwing this out there, rather than making a point…
Can one be the CEO of a billion dollar company, and be actually free?
The biggest weak point in the structures is that they always go back to some “I have to do this,” or “doesn’t life just suck,” or “I hate this”
When the universe is not ‘set up’ to be terrible forever and a day. Even without PCEs that can be grasped. There’s no big rule that everything has to be terrible. So when I arrive at those conclusions, I know I’m missing something. So I just keep going til something breaks
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Reading through, it seems we all agree the only realization is becoming happy and harmless at this moment. For in doing so, we get to live life without our tricks; simply appreciating the magic of time, space and matter while enjoying our body, all the senses, as well as consciousness and intelligence.
With the latter, we can ruminate on how we want to personally live this life. How we want to meet the options that come up and anticipate them in the future. The only viable/sustainable answers come when we are intimately aware that peace is already present and always has been. From there we know the only problem is our lucipher-esque rebellion: We want something sinister for our own pleasure - power over others. Become resentful when we don’t get it. And turn outright nasty if the problem stays unrecognized and/or unresolved for a long enough period of time.
Otoh, when we are aware of the peace already in existence, we know the first solution to any problem is being happy and harmless. We know such a state will generally bring prosperity and security the more able one is to stay in it. And when prosperity and security are not options, we know our sense of wonder, our creativity - whether we have a little or a lot - and our intelligence - ditto - will find the best path forward if there is one. Lol. And if there isn’t one then we’ll at least meet the inevitable end as happy as can be.
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I like this image.
Also because of Milton: like Lucifer who ended up separated from Paradise, then suffering for what was lost and doing evil, I suffer and behave wickedly separated from the actual paradise that is verified in the PCEs.
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Honestly, just a lot of money and making more connections. The feeling of security and being part of my peer group. As if I’m “moving” somewhere with them. There are definite downsides to this position as I’d barely have any social life and I’d always be on-call. I’d have to travel a lot too.
This really highlights for me how much I dislike the feeling of responsibility. It just makes everything a serious business. I just feel like it’s not supposed to be like this.
I don’t really want to move up even if I got paid a million dollars a year. I feel like I have to move up. For recognition and status among peers and friends. It’s not even a willing want, but like a forced desire if that makes any sense.
Certainly I’ve thought of this. I’m sure it’s not even going to be more pleasant as I’d be dealing with corporate politics and the such like.
Haha Yes I can see this intellectually. I’m trying to approach it sincerely. I don’t want to skip over all these bits of uncomfortable feelings and beliefs that are there and try to get into the actual world. This has been a change of approach on my part. I genuinely want to see what’s standing in the way. I want to uncover what my true desires are and why I’m choosing not to be happy and harmless.
After a long time I’ve found this to be the case too. This kind of is in line with what I was asking further up about if anyone has had an issue disappear forever or instantly. I haven’t had it happen and it had caused a lot of frustration and disappointment. But that’s because I didn’t stick with it and delve deeper and keep that awareness and inquiry going. I’m finding that everything is linked. All of the instinctual passions are linked. Each one does not exist on its own. I find one belief is linked with another belief and that is part of a larger identity and it starts to create the outline of ‘me’. Definitely agree with everything you’ve written in your post as it’s being uncovered in the same way for me too.
It does seem like the trick is to get ‘me’ to acknowledge this sincerely. Why am I invested in not being happy and harmless? It’s been a slower process for me. I’ll have some days of feeling happy and harmless, then some issue shows up and it gets to be too much and then it all seems so far away. Then I stay in that pit for so long that I forget what happiness and harmlessness even feels like. I’m tired of going in circles.
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I had some trouble sleeping last night thinking about this. There are more feelings associated with this not moving up. Feelings of “being left behind”. And further in that is the feeling of loneliness. So I have to move up otherwise I’ll end up left behind and be lonely. Along with that there’s the feeling of competition and how if I don’t compete then I’ll be a nobody. Something that my family has reinforced in the past. Reinforced through the instilling of fear. It feels impossible to fight against this. Why do I have to prove anything to anyone? But I rebel by trying to think up ways where I will never have to work again. I don’t like working because work isn’t just about working but also all of these convoluted ways of the world. It’s all about maintaining this self-image and presenting it to others. My relationship to them is maintained by how I think they are judging me. There’s no intimacy here. This relationship to others is about power. It’s about how they view me and my status. Ironically all of these psychological shenanigans only serve to further alienate me and only bolster the loneliness. 
I can see it plainly now. To relate to others in this manner means I never meet another directly. I’m meeting a mirage made out of some vague rules on how I should view and relate to others. How to conjure up this “other”.
So I’m coming back to the question “what do I really want?”. I don’t want to be lonely. Behind all of that was the feeling of isolation. I still feel it. And this whole thing feels like a large edifice that I can never win against. This only bolsters my loneliness. In this loneliness, there’s also a feeling of the desire to “connect”. But there’s also a strange feeling of relief (with simultaneous anxiety) as I write this too as I can at least see where that anxiety and drive was emanating from. There’s more to this, I can feel it.
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There’s a whole social construct which ‘I’ need and seek, as long as ‘I’ am.
I’ve seen it previously in myself when I’ve deleted one form of social media, I find myself spending more time on another. Same with leaving one social group, I seek out another social group pretty immediately.
But you can ask yourself, what am I really trying to accomplish? In the big picture?
You don’t really care about winding up at the top of the corporate ladder. That’s just so you can have esteem for yourself, so other people like you. But you know it’s not worth it.
Something happened for me around 10 months ago that I realized that what I really wanted was, to become free. And it actually did check those boxes… I could be intimate with others, which satisfies that social desire. It is the greatest accomplishment possible, which satisfies that desire for esteem. Eventually it became clear that no one else would understand this accomplishment, but that didn’t matter, because ‘I’ understand, and ‘I’ approve of my own accomplishment.
So it’s using that same desire, which ‘I’ always have, but in service of becoming free. And then there isn’t resentment, because I’m not being made to do anything I don’t want to do anymore. And I don’t feel sad and disappointed, because I’m doing something meaningful to me. It even makes my interactions with others more pleasant. I’ve been very pleased about that.
But it’s in a bigger arena than the specific one that friends, bosses etc. will understand or can understand. It’s radical. There’s that question, are you ready to do things for reasons beyond what others can understand?
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Ooh this is a big one, great way of putting it! This is a drama that I had going on for so long but I could never put a name to it, this is bang on!
Even though all the boxes are ticked when happy and harmless, they are not ticked in a way that is acknowledged and respected in the real world, they will not recognise all these things that I am doing or being because their focus is on values that are no longer entertained in my life.
This goes 180 degrees opposite to the desires of the social identity, which are always to do with how others will perceive me.
What a HUGE shift to go from this complete concern about the image that is ‘me’ to doing things purely because they are sensible.
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Yeah I can definitely relate to this one, the reason I wrote the above posts was also to hopefully provide some encouragement because as persistent as this ‘story’ that is ‘me’ is, lately I am having these experiences where this ‘story’ is unequivocally seen as having no centre, no substance, no meaning, no ‘meat’ to it at all… It is like an echo that is playing on repeat inside this brain, such a persistent one though! This echo is the sum total of all the conditioning that is ‘humanity’.
I don’t know if this has been happening because of the long PCE over the weekend or in general as a result of all the chipping away the past couple of years but the past few days I am having these spontaneous experiences where this ‘narrative’ that is ‘me’ as identity is temporarily seen as having no substance whatsoever and in this seeing it disappears to reveal that life is already complete as it always has been (which makes the grim and glum echo more ridiculous in comparison).
The main thing though is that this story that is ‘me’ will not go as a result of putting together a few bits of investigation, it is such a persistent thing that it takes chipping away from all angles it seems, for a prolonged period.
BUT it does seem for me like the ‘story’ is getting a few too many holes in it lately haha, it is going from ‘me’ being the most substantial thing there could ever be, to all that is ‘me’ having the weight of a feather and spontaneously being seen as completely irrelevant.
The cool thing when these experiences are happening is that there is this kinda WTF/are you serious reaction, as in where did this ridiculous ‘narrative’ come from? Like who started this terrible game of Chinese whispers that has been playing out in this brain, because it is so unbelievably silly in comparison when it is seen that life is already perfect. And yet this narrative is going round believing that life is truly a vale of tears…
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I’ve been reflecting on my relationships to others. To my parents in particular as that one I find the most unpleasant. What is that relationship composed of? There’s a lof of guilt and resenment. I feel like I have to keep talking to them and fulfill their expectations, but we don’t have anything in common. It would be fine if they met me as another free human being and not someone who has to do whatever expectations they have of me. They will say at one point that they are okay with however I live my life and then express disappointment if it is not in alignment with what they want. Then they try to create guilt and make me do the “Right” thing because they always know best. Despite me being a fully grown adult. So I start to feel anger and resentment towards them. It feels like a prison associating with them much of the time. So why do do I still do it? I found the answer to be loyalty. Because of loyalty, I only have the options of either going along with what they say or rebelling against them. And rebelling also keeps the relationship alive. It’s just another way of loyalty in action. This may be the case with all of my relationships. So how can I associate with them and others without this loyalty? How do I sever this bond? How can I allow them to live as they see fit without getting pulled into this internal conflict?
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