Connection to pure intent without contact?

Oh dear. Claudiu, you are a feeling being, are you not? You experience pure intent, do you not?

Well we appear to be at an impasse, which impasse is clearly due to our differing experiences.

If I were you all the differences between me and everyone else with success with actualism would be ringing alarm bells!

I don’t see much to say at this point now except to draw your attention again to what you experienced (or almost experienced) with Richard in 2013.

Cheers,
Claudiu

Until now at least, I had no doubt that this was the case, due to Richard’s references to apperception in the absence of PCEs, one of which I interpreted to be this one from the same article:

When the original moment of apperceptiveness is rapidly passed over it is the purpose of ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ to accustom one to prolong that moment of apperceptiveness –a sensuous awareness bereft of feeling content– so that uninterrupted apperception can eventuate.

In a PCE one doesn not use HAIETMOBA (although one could say that then remains the same “non-verbal attitude or a wordless approach to life”, but…)

Well… you could ask him again :smirk:

Question

In Vineeto’s report of becoming free I read:

This sweet longing has always propelled me forward to go all the way, to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and fears and now I had the privilege to experience this sweet intimacy day after day, morning to night.

This experience of ongoing intimacy was so much better than any PCE I ever had, and of course better than any excellence experience I enjoyed because it was dynamic and effervescent, moving closer and closer to my destiny, encouraging me to take the decision to allow the last, final and irrevocable step to happen.

Make no mistake in thinking that it needs a personal contact with Richard in order to take the last step to becoming actually free. What it needs is the unwavering and undiminished intent (100%) to bridge the separation that stands in the way of an actual intimacy with another human being – any human being – and secondly the awareness and intent that what one is doing is not for oneself but for everybody in order for the self-less purity to unfold its magic.
Cheers Vineeto

This experience of ongoing intimacy (can this experience happen with inanimate objects as well ) ??? Did Geoffrey and Srinath and Craig experience this intimacy with another human being ?

From @geoffrey’s report:

I saw without a shadow of a doubt that ‘I’ am the cause of every evil, corruption, dirt… just because ‘I’ am ‘so precious’. How ‘I’ mess everything up for myself and everybody just because ‘I’ am. And not some dissociated ‘I’ with enough quotes not to be me, but me right now thinking this.

That is the awareness that ‘I’ am causing the separation

From @Srinath’s report:

I went shopping with a friend later that morning. I was much minimised and in a magical world, but could clearly feel my presence there. I was clearly blocking intimacy with my friend and everyone else just by being there, I tried to get rid of ‘me’ somehow but could not do it.

It seemed like I was hanging on by a very thin thread that stayed firmly in place. At that point I saw my girlfriend lying on the couch and once again I could see that what was separating us was ‘me’. I went out to the balcony and looked down and saw some people walking. I could see that even though everything was nearly perfect that last little bit of ‘me’ was there separating myself from everyone else on this planet and spoiling perfection. The spoonful that weighed a tonne. ‘I’ would roar back into full existence creating havoc for this body and every body, given half a chance. I had to ‘die’ so that this body and every other body could live peacefully.

Directly after this Srinath becomes free:

I would need to truly die. The enormity of this dawned on me suddenly like it never had before. The enormity of what I had to give up. It took my breath away. Suddenly I felt a twinge of sadness that emerged from me like a thin pungent streak. But it cut-off abruptly as if in mid-air, still-born.

Nothing else happened.

It’s not as clear in @geoffrey’s report but yes the desire/interest for intimacy with other humans does indeed seem to be an essential ingredient

@FrankN If you click the ‘self immolation’ in blue it will take you to a thread that took place a while ago which was discussing this very thing.

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@rick, if you are looking at a car, that car is an actual thing that exists in the actual world. Your eyeballs, nerves, brain and consciousness are actually doing the experiencing of that car. Still ‘you’ feel like it’s ‘your’ experience even though ‘you’ are blind. ‘You’ have feeling reactions to things that actually exists. ‘You’ are around while an actual car is experienced by the flesh and blood body – although it’s clouded by ‘your’ presence. The lighter ‘your’ presence is the less it will cloud the actual experience. Same with pure intent.

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this is a very fine point Miguel, very interesting . thanks

Very down to earth and i think applicable( as in practicing of the method) description, solavann. Thanks

@solvann This is nice, actually. I agree with your depiction insofar as I would expect equivalent processes taking place between an identity and a car, as would be taking place between an identity and a “palpable life-force” (aka pure intent), as both are equally actual. One quibble: Richard in no uncertain terms depicts the identity as being conscious; as having the capacity of awareness; basically, the capacity to experience. For one example:

Richard (2012): . . . that ‘over-arching benevolence and benignity’, which the feeling-being inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body all those years ago experienced and named ‘pure intent’, became immanently accessible . . . . the feeling-being inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body all those years ago became consciously aware of pure intent . . . .
Mailing List 'D' Respondent No. 17

This is in contrast to your depiction of the identity and its feelings as nothing more than blind reactions incapable of experience; incapable of consciousness; lacking any awareness (completely blind). I don’t wish for us (right now) to get hung up on whether your model is more correct than Richard’s, or whether Richard did or did not mean what he said, or whether he was or was not speaking sloppily, or whether he was or was not speaking metaphorically, or whether you are or are not correctly interpreting his metaphors. I am just pointing out an apparent incongruity between the two depictions, which may or may not become relevant later. That said, I would like to examine your depiction of an identity reacting to the actual world, along with its implications:

Let’s look at it by using yourself as an example (if what follows does not align with your depiction, please advise):

Solvann is a feeling being.
Solvann is inside a body.
The body experiences things.
Solvann can neither perceive nor experience things.
Solvann is blind.
Solvann is a (blind) reaction to things that the body experiences.
Solvann feels like the body’s experiences are his experiences.
Solvann clouds the body’s experience of things.
The less of Solvann there is, the less he clouds the body’s experience.

Scenario:

The body sees a snake.
The body does not (cannot) fear snakes.
Solvann is blind.
Solvann has no awareness of the snake (or of anything for that matter).
Yet when the body sees the snake, Solvann reacts with fear.

Question: How does the body’s experience of the snake cause Solvann to react at all?

Somehow the body’s sensory information must reach Solvann.
Somehow the body’s sensory information must interact in some way with Solvann to produce Solvann’s reaction.

The main point to observe: If Solvann reacts to an actual thing, then the actual thing must somehow reach and make contact with Solvann in order to catalyze Solvann’s reaction. The question is: What is happening at the point of contact? Here is one theory which Richard ascribed to at one time. (Note his description of affect as not only a reaction, but an experience. Which begs the question, who or what is having the affective experience? We will explore that later.)

Richard (2001): The sequence of experience is the sensate experience (sensation) first; the affective experience (feelings) second; the cerebral experience (thought) third. The routing of the nerve signal goes first to the thalamus, whereupon the signal is split into two, with one part going to the amygdala (12-14 milliseconds) which induces an immediate affective reaction and another going to the cortex (25 milliseconds) which induces a thought response. Mailing List 'B' Respondent No. 19

In Richard’s (slightly outdated) above depiction, an (actual) signal from the sensory system travels directly to and – after 12-14 milliseconds – makes contact with the regions of the brain where affective reactions are synthesized. In all mammals (minus a handful of humans), there exists at all times a literal (non metaphoric) and physical (actual) connection between the senses (aka that which is “pure”) and the affections (aka that which is “impure”). When neurons within those aforementioned brain regions are stimulated by either organic sensory signals or by electric signals administered in lab settings, there is automatic affective reaction. Incidentally, damage to or manipulation of these brain regions will either induce, reduce, eliminate, or otherwise alter affective reaction accordingly. Indisputably, the synthesis of affections arises from, and is entirely dependent on, the dynamic physical processes of the brain. (It is not a coincidence that a bullet to the head is likewise able to eliminate all identity and feeling.)

Speaking of affective reactions being dependent on/ automatically arising from dynamic physical processes, Richard identified a specific region of the brainstem as the origin of identity/feelings:

Richard (2001): I would suggest the ‘Substantia Nigra’ in or near the top two thirds of the ‘Reticular Activating System’ (sometimes known as the ‘Reticular System’) as being the source of the instinctual self/ the instinctual passions.
Mailing List 'B' Respondent No. 55

That little fleshy piece of organic matter then is the source of all the “impurity” in the universe. Ultimately, the universe generated instinctual passions, thus it could rightly be said: Purity generates impurity. Go figure.

Lastly, I am interested in looking more closely at something you wrote:

If the body’s experience of the car is, as you say, clouded (by the presence of self), then the body experiences not only the car, but the cloud. That is, the body experiences the presence of self. Yes? No?

I think you are misunderstanding what I wrote or reading too much into it.
The identity is incapable of actual experience, it only has an affective/virtual experience/reality (by it’s very nature as a feeling being).

The identity does not have eyeballs. It sure does feel like the identity and its reality is consciousness itself until you have a pure consciousness experience and your view on life is changes forever.

I’m not implying ‘I’ live on a different planet. When you have a PCE the car in front of you is still there, the tree in the background doesn’t vanish etc. If ‘I’ get mad for being stuck in traffic it’s because I’m actually stuck in traffic. I thought that was clear when I wrote:


Yep, and still there is no tiny person to be found in any region of the brain even though surgeons have been looking. Why don’t that no-where-to-be-found-in-any-brain-region-rick self-immolate and see what actual self remains? I don’t know but it would be cool to find out.

Why do I get the feeling I soon have to justify something Richard wrote twenty years ago :laughing:

The self can be aware of itself via self-awareness. So, being aware of how ‘cloudy’ I am, or how I am experiencing this moment of being alive.
The body can experience the presence of self/reality via attentiveness.
Self-awareness and attentiveness is not mutually exclusive.
With apperception the body becomes aware of the actual world ‘before’ reality – stepping out from the real world and into the actual world.

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I think it is clear now. “Solvann” gets mad about an actual traffic jam because, for one, “he” does not exist on a different planet from the one where the actual traffic jam exists; “he” exists on the same actual planet where actual things exist. Indeed, “he” exists in an actual body, on an actual planet, in an actual universe. Does “he” not?

Since the body (the actual) experiences the presence of self (the non-actual), then is there – or is there not – contact between sensation and affect; actual and non-actual; purity and impurity?

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I think you first need to define in what way you exist as a feeling being before I can answer. Looks like we have come full circle and are back to Drawing the line between feeling and fact

But you are already aware that I define the feeling-being to exist in fact. For example:

The crux of the question posed in this topic which you initiated was: How can there be a connection between something that doesn’t actually exist (feelings and feeling beings) and something that does actually exist (pure intent and traffic jams) without there being any contact between the two? I am suggesting that the fact that one experiences the other – that is, the fact that the actual experiences the non-actual, and the non-actual experiences the actual – signifies contact between the two, because, if for no other reason, contact is inherent to the nature of experience.

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Which is why I asked you about your experience:

I am interested in exploring the nature of that which exists at the point of contact. Is the point of contact actual, non-actual, or a hybrid of the two? How does the one touch the other?

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So, what is your opinion, @rick, about the following fragment I had already quoted above?
Do you think it sheds any light on your exploration? Or, on the contrary, do you find it unsatisfactory, obscure or at least unrelated with respect to what you want to find out? How do you interpret it?

Miguel, I interpret that fragment as simply pointing out that “pure intent” refers both to an actual thing (a palpable life-force) as well as the feeling-being’s experience of the actual thing/ it’s (experiential) connection to the actual thing, i.e., “that (experiential) ‘state of being connected’ [to that palpable life-force].” I do not find anything in that fragment that sheds light on how it is that something which does not in fact exist can experience or experientially connect (i.e., make contact) with something which does in fact exist (and vice versa).

But I also wanted to avoid adopting or relying on another man’s words. I wanted to see if Solvann (or any one else who wished to participate), could look carefully at their own experience as to what was occurring between this interaction of sensate/affect; actual/non-actual; existent/non-existent; purity/impurity.

‘I’ am a dreamed-imagined entity

In any dream the material being dreamed about is sourced in the actual/physical world. The strongest predictor of sleep-dreaming content is waking content from the previous day.

For example, if you were around dogs during the day you are more likely to dream about dogs in your sleep.

‘I’ take actually-existing sensate content and repurpose it, bending, twisting, distorting it into ‘my’ reality - which is only ever a dreamed, second-hand facsimile of anything actual. ‘I’ cannot exist in the actual because ‘I’ am the dreamer and the dream.

‘I’ do not exist; ‘I’ am dreamed. ‘I’ am imaginative content. Unless you are saying that imaginative content has the same existence-status as actually-existing things. I do not think that makes sense.

So, if you can accept the above (even for the moment):

The connection consists of the information sourced in the actual world which is then dreamed about.

In the same way that if you see some dogs in your waking life and then dream about dogs that night.

If you enjoy & appreciate this moment of being alive, you weaken the strength of the dreaming, allowing the purity to be more and more apparent, which means that even though the dreaming is still occurring, it has less substance than it did previously

‘I’ can increase ‘my’ dreaming-desire for the actual, increase my rememoration of the PCE, increase my sensuous enjoyment & appreciation of sensate, momentary content, and that allows greater and greater purity (legitimate, actual content) to ‘seep into’ my dreaming

Because the actual, which is what the dreaming exists ‘inside of’ (just how in your sleeping dreams, your dreaming exists inside of your actually-existing head, inside of your actually-existing bed, sourcing from learned information from the actually-existing universe), is always there, always providing more legitimate content.

Edit:

I haven’t quite captured how pure intent seems to ‘penetrate’ into the dreaming, into ‘me,’ similar to rays of light increasingly penetrating a pond as stirred-up detritus settles

Edit 2: @claudiu’s reply below seems to explain well what is happening with this ‘penetration’ that is experienced

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So here’s a perhaps interesting train of thought…

No Consciousness
If consciousness were not in the picture, it’d be very simple. There’s only the trees, rocks, neurons, etc., that all actually exist, and nothing else - all is actual.

Pure Consciousness
With pure consciousness, it’s still equally simple. There is human body, the brain, neurons, the brain generates this actually-existing consciousness which in effect is the neurons in action. All is actual and pure.

Illusions
The only tricky part comes into play when ‘feeling-being’ comes into the picture, via ‘feeling-being consciousness’ (aka ‘regular’ consciousness).

The ‘feeling-being’ is illusory, i.e. not actual… contrasted with pure consciousness which is actual. How is it possible? How can something actual generate something that is not actual?

There’s actually nothing tricky about this, either. If you consider watching a video of a man juggling 3 balls on an iPhone screen… in actuality there is no man juggling 3 balls, there’s just LEDs blinking on and off. The man juggling the 3 balls is an illusion, i.e. not actual (there is no actual man juggling the balls). So there’s no problem in the actual generating something not-actual, it is straightforward. Everything is actual, but the activity of actual things can generate illusions that are perceived to exist but don’t actually exist. (Note it requires a human being conscious of the screen for the illusion to be generated/perceived.) There is still actually not anything that isn’t actual. Nothing that is actual “connects” to anything not-actual.

"Sentient" Illusions ???
The only tricky part, then, is when that is which is not actual/illusory is something that is sentient / has an experience of existing. How on earth can an illusion have an experience of being not-illusory ???

Consciousness Itself ???
To which I will respond… how on earth can matter give rise to consciousness in the first place ??? What, specifically, about neurons firing, results in the experience of consciousness? Nobody actually knows the mechanism by which it takes place… it is called the “hard problem of consciousness”. But evidently it occurs, nobody disputes that.

As there is no satisfactory scientific or philosophical answer to how matter can give rise to consciousness, there can certainly be no satisfactory scientific or philosophical answer to how matter can give rise to a feeling-being ‘consciousness’ that is only illusory (as this is a subset of consciousness in general).

The Realm of Experience
So then we bridge this ‘hard’ gap by moving from the realm of explaining how physical processes give rise to consciousness, over to the other side, to experience, where we are all sure that experience is happening. So we forget the question of how the consciousness arises / by which mechanism is does, and now we’re in the realm of experience - the realm of actualism.

Actual and Not-Actual
In this realm, then, we can now talk of two categories of experience - actual and not-actual. With a PCE being actual, while a feeling/emotion being not-actual.

Examining our experience carefully, we can see that there is never any “contact” or “connection” per se betwixt the two!

PCE
In a PCE – there is only actuality being experienced, actual sense inputs, I am the senses, etc.

Outside of PCE, no pure intent
Outside of PCE, setting aside pure intent for the moment — there is absolutely zero that is actual. The senses ‘I’ experience are not actual senses, ‘I’ do not perceive anything actual. By the time the senses become experienced by ‘me’, they are already part of the illusory ‘reality’ that ‘I’ simultaneously generate and inhabit. So there is no experiential connection or contact between actuality and ‘me’ via the senses – it is all ‘me’. No matter how hard ‘I’ look, never will ‘I’ see something actual.

Outside of PCE, pure intent
Now remains only the topic under discussion – pure intent. What is this “state of being connected”?

What is clear is that the experience of pure intent is of something that does not mix or interact with ‘me’ in any format. ‘I’ can experientially try to ‘feel it out’ and intuitively extend ‘my’ feeling-tentacles out ‘into’ it to try to perceive it, yet all in vain – no part of ‘me’ can reach it. Likewise I can try to reach it via ‘my’ thinking or via ‘my’ senses, with equal results.

Similarly, pure intent itself cannot reach into ‘me’. It doesn’t have any control or power over ‘me’. It cannot force me to feel this way or that. It can’t exert anything on ‘me’ at all.

I got a very clear glimpse of this observing Richard & Vineeto in the airport when I was leaving from my first visit. I wrote about it on the old Yahoo! group – essentially I observed that all the vibes and psychic currents that were swirling around in the very air ‘I’ was witnessing, simply passed through Richard & Vineeto as if they weren’t there at all. Not only did they have no effect on it whatsoever, and it had no effect on them – but they simply were incapable of even perceiving it!

Back to one’s own experience of pure intent… it turns out the only way pure intent can be experienced is by this apparently “new” sense, never used before yet apparently it has always been there – what Richard called an “existential” sense. Via this existential sense, which is not ‘me’ sensing it out, pure intent becomes experienceable. Although one can colloquially say that I as a feeling-being am experiencing pure intent, if one is more technical/precise about it, it’s rather that ‘I’ as a feeling-being allow the experiencing of it to occur – and ‘I’ can see that it is something entirely outside of ‘me’, not of ‘me’ or ‘my’ doings, that ‘I’ can never become or touch, and that can never touch ‘me’.

If I keep this existential sensing firmly in mind and allow a PCE to happen, then it becomes evident that the existential sensing has been what-I-am all-along, namely the actual flesh and blood body being conscious.

i.e.:

RICHARD: In other words, the living experience, the moment-to-moment experiential ‘tapping-into’ or ‘locking-onto’ the pristine purity of an actual innocence – which the flesh-and-blood body known generically as [Respondent] (albeit forever invisible to feeling-being ‘[Respondent’s nickname]’ and all ‘his’ feeling-being interlocutors) is already living anyway – is to be ‘tapping-into’ or ‘locking-onto’ that palpable life-force, that actually occurring stream of benevolence and benignity, already personified as flesh-and-blood bodies only (i.e., sans identities in toto/ their entire affective faculties) in actuality.
Mailing List 'D' Respondent No. 17

So pure intent is, perhaps, a way that the already actually-existing actual consciousness of this flesh and blood body called Claudiu, makes itself available to the otherwise-impenetrable feeling-being consciousness of the feeling-being called ‘Claudiu’ being conscious of ‘Claudiu’ being conscious, so that feeling-being ‘Claudiu’ can use it as a beacon to eventually find ‘his’ way to self-immolate once and for all… all the while without ‘Claudiu’ himself “touching” it, per se.

"Connection" ???

Why then is it called a connection? A connection between what and what?

Here [I think it] comes in handy, to think of pure intent more as the “state of being connected” rather than the connection, per se. i.e. it’s not that there is a ‘me’ that connects to the purity, and this connection is called pure intent – it’s rather that what is experienced as a feeling-being as a “state of being connected” is in-and-of-itself pure intent, which is equivalent to/the same as the palpable life-force that pure intent actually is.

While experiencing pure intent, it makes sense experientially to call it a connection, as in to colloquially say “I am connected to the purity”… because the purity is being experienced, it is as if ‘I’ am connected to that purity. But this has grammatical implications, as if there is some sort of thing, physical or otherwise, touching ‘me’ and touching the purity at the same time, as in forming an actual connection. But rather it’s more that the purity becomes available to ‘me’, and this “condition of the purity being available to be experienced (via that existential sensing that is not ‘me’)” is what “pure intent” refers to.

However that is quite a mouthful so perhaps we can just leave it as “establish a connection to that purity” :smiley: .

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@claudiu I enjoyed this treatment, thank you!

This makes a lot of sense to me, I was just thinking last night about how the usual human sense of ‘connection’ between people is just when two people are feeling the same thing at the same time. But that’s not really a connection, it’s more that we as feeling-beings transmit emotions to one another. In actuality there isn’t any such connection, because it’s all already one thing, one universe. We’re already completely attached to everything, which is the same as saying there are no ‘connections.’

And the ‘connection’ is never very dependable anyway, because sometimes the emotions transmit as in “I feel the same as you,” and sometimes they do not. Often it results in feeling oppositely!

So it makes sense that as ‘I,’ the entity, experience that existential sense called pure intent, ‘I’ would think “Ah! I am connected to something!” but the ‘connection’ is just what ‘I’ think is happening when ‘something’ is ‘making me’ feel a certain way (in this case, ‘purity, perfection’). There is no ‘connection’… I am just detecting, experientially, what is already happening - and has always been happening.

But… as you say, it is useful to describe it colloquially as a connection, since that is how ‘I’ experience it… and I am an ‘I,’ after all!

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Still processing the rest, but @henryyyyyyyyyy 's focus on this part drew my attention to it as well. I had to double check my own usage of the term because my long-held understanding was that they are literal equivalents that refer to the exact same thing; that there is literally no difference between “connection” and the “state of being connected.” The suffix “+ion” refers to the state or condition of something. Your inclusion of the word “rather” (above) suggests that you see a distinction.


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If two things are connected, they are in a state of being connected, which means that there is connection. They all refer to the same happening. Connection = State of being connected:


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Are you drawing your own idiosyncratic distinction between “connection” and “state of being connected”? Do you interpret Richard as having drawn the same idiosyncratic distinction there?