Vineeto: From this you can see the enlightened ‘Richard’ was similarly hamstrung by dominant passions to give sufficient attention to sensuousness at the time. Maybe this goes some way to at least restore your confidence, rather than pride, in your capacity for sagacity.
Claudiu: Yeeees, I may have been being a bit… … melodramatic. Before I pinned down the basic resentment I even had a bout of feeling like all is lost, I’m so bad at this, I will never succeed… I really felt that! But I was able to take a step back and say ok, sensibly speaking, this doesn’t make sense, I’ve factually progressed and learned quite a bit. Once I came back to my senses I realized what I was doing and thought this was a good way to characterize it: (image)
In hindsight it may have been pride’s flip-side, humility, rearing its head for a last hurrah – which by now it, too, appears to be vastly diminished if not gone!
Hi Claudiu:
This is excellent – all your ‘skeletons’ are now revealing themselves one after the other. There is no other way.
Whenever we (associates of Richard) had a plan for any enterprise for the future, bigger than going for a boat-ride, Richard never argued pros and cons with insufficient information available but suggested to make it as actual as possible, meaning to proceed, as far as possible, as if it was actually going to happen. This not only did provide more practical information but, even more importantly, brought out the involved people’s hopes and concerns and possible hidden objections for the planned project.
This is exactly what you are doing – and what a treasure trove of discoveries you make! Ha, and what a wonderfully funny image you found for it. 
Claudiu: With that being said I appreciate your follow-up here. I did mistakenly come away with the impression that ‘Richard’ knew immediately what to do from the get-go, sensuousness, and immediately started succeeding with it. That is true in a sense, he was able to eliminate anger and basic resentment within 3 weeks. But it took him 11 years or so to eventually succeed… and what you pointed out indicates that ‘his’ process of figuring it out and going through it has similarities, basically ‘he’ was just ‘human’ as well and not some ‘superhuman’.
That being said he is more than just a regular ‘human’, he was the first to discover this is possible and bring it into the world… when I repeatedly read it over many years the plain facts of what to do and how to do it and what it is, it still takes time to sink in and to actually do it, and here he was, without any guide written, and yet he managed to do it anyway! Remarkable and not something I would have been able to do, I wouldn’t be the first – but of course, I don’t have to be!
Yes, I did have the impression that you misunderstood – for instance, I only quoted that Richard started with “to deliberately imitate the actual” (link) and you took it that ‘he’ started with sensuousness.
Yes, “basically ‘he’ was just ‘human’” and Richard emphasized this on several occasions –
Richard: This is very important, because people can put themselves down only too easily as being not good enough, not intelligent enough or not capable enough. I am not gifted or special … I was born of ordinary parents, was sent to an ordinary state school – receiving an average education until I was fifteen years of age – took an ordinary job and worked for a living. I eventually got married and had four children and bought a house and … in short, I was relatively normal and did all the expected things. Thus did I live my life for thirty two years according to the ‘tried and true’ methods as laid down by the countless millions of other humans that had lived before me. I tried my best to make their system work to produce the optimum result … but to no avail.
Only then did I make the first and most important movement of my own volition … I discarded the ‘tried and true’ as being the ‘tried and failed’. (I did say ‘I was relatively normal’ because one thing, and one thing alone, stood out that distinguished me from whomsoever else I met: I wanted to know – as an actuality – just what it was to be a human being here on this planet, as this body, in this life-time.) (Richard, List A, No. 26)
And ‘he’ was determined to find out, dedicated to make actuality a lived experience 24hrs a day, no matter what, able to use ‘his’ ‘native human intelligence’ and, most important of all, ‘giving up’ was not in ‘his’ vocabulary. Richard was also very, very thorough (before and after self-immolation), and I came to observe this and marvel at it whenever he researched something in every single topic he inquired into, including precise vocabulary.
I fully agree I would have never been able to be the first, but then nobody else ever needs to be – an actual freedom is already here (discovered, lived, reported and explained by the “genitor”). And consequently, an actual freedom is now so much easier to eventually become apparent for each pioneer.
As you rightly say – “it still takes time to sink in”. Richard refers to this time as a gestation period, as in, some insight or realisation may need some time simmering in the background before it is ready to be actualized.
Naiveté turned up to its full extent will see you through to the very (welcome and blessed) oblivion.
Cheers Vineeto