So it’s trickier than “life sucks, I want to kill myself” because oblivion isn’t actually the motivation, based on that statement; as an entity I expect to live forever I am ending the object of what ‘i’ think sucks, but I am not actually trying to end ‘me’.
I desire escape, not an end. Am I interpreting that correctly?
I continue to suffer because I believe (the concept) that ‘I’ cannot end.
My mind’s been in a gridlock the past 30min looking at this 
it’s one of the bits that never quite made sense to me.
When I was reading that page @Andrew just now, a thought popped into my head - “is the fear of death a furphy?’ Something about that page is flipping everything upside down…
So I wrote a little in my notes and I can see that ‘I’ actually cannot imagine not ‘being’, ‘I’ deeply feel that ‘I’ exist forever. So even though I don’t believe in god ‘I’ still believe that after death ‘I’ will land somewhere. Except that instead of it being heaven/hell, ‘I’ picture this ultimate meaningless, empty void, some nihilistic nothingness. ‘I’ fear going ‘there’ so badly because in ‘there’ I am forever separated from everything and everyone ‘I’ hold dear. Now the more I look at that ‘void’ there more I notice that I am simply describing what ‘I’ am at core as ‘being’ - I am already ‘there’, forever separated and alone.
The fear of the death of this body is a fear of having to be ‘me’ for eternity, because ‘I’ am incapable of imagining not ‘being’, any fantasy about death is actually a fantasy about existing forever as an ‘entity’, some ghost, forever separated.
So do ‘I’ actually fear extinction? Also I have a sense that I have already explored this and maybe even written about it in this thread 
But life doesn’t suck !
Life lives in the grips of misery and resentment , sorrow and woe , anxiety and sadness , of course does suck. But those are all signs something is wrong. The point is to fix it. And then you see that life lived happily and harmlessly, not to mention naively — is very very far from sucking !
Yeah, it threw me for a six too.
I realised it’s important that he uses the word “concept” in the sentence. In chapter 18 “afterlife is a myth” he explores again the topic and calls it “calenture” at the bottom of page 128.
What struck me is that I assumed that I didn’t have any notion of existing beyond death, having ceased to persue anything of the sort a long time ago.
However, I still live as if I will live forever. As if I have all the rest of forever to work my “stuff” through, if indeed I am working through any of it.
I am so interested in this particular idea now. That despite being an atheist, interested in actualism, ‘my’ ‘presence’ is still producing the behaviour of an 'immortal being '.
As if I really have a ‘future’.
It would seem, putting it all together, that the “concept” or “calenture” is baked into the nature of ‘self’.
Even if someone swears to having no such belief, or even word for word says that “death is the end” , the reality of ‘being’ is synonymous with acting immortal.
Essentially, wasting one’s life (talking about myself here) is the product of avoiding the actuality of mortality. If mortality is comprehended, rather than brushed quickly aside, or assumed to be something in the ‘future’ then this is incredibly powerful force for change.
That’s good stuff. Because ultimately I’m perpetuating misery and suffering by doing nothing about it but wallowing in it.
Yes. I can see that that’s what ‘I’ am doing. Just wanting to escape but fully intact.
I’m guessing that’s Richard’s journal? I’ve been thinking about getting it. I imagine a lot of the same stuff that’s on the web site is there but better organized. Do you have the DVDs as well? If so can you play them in a DVD player? If I remember correctly it says you have to use a computer.
I understand that on one level. But ‘being’ sucks really bad. And I am often convinced I have a really good argument for why. Meaning it’s not just an attitude but a coherent philosophy, at least in this skull. An equation of suckieness if you will. I hate seeing people and animals suffer. It makes me want to crumble the world up and throw it away. It’s hard to see where am wrong. On the other hand I’ve had PCEs and I know life can be pure amazement. Getting back there some times seems impossible because of my ‘air tight argument’ against life itself.
Some ways of ‘being’ suck more than others. Being a happy and harmless ‘being’ is great and being a naive one is wonderful!
You already know where you are wrong
^^ this is where you are wrong.
One could argue life is supposed to intrinsically suck, except the PCE shows that life intrinsically doesn’t suck (as a fact). So all the arguments and philosophies, self-consistent they may be, simply fail when brought into contact with the facts.
You can rest assured you can hold on to your air tight arguments forever until the day of your ultimate demise. And you can do that if you want. The question is, is that what you really want? 
Ha, I’m refusing to be happy. I know. Which makes me feel like an asshole, lol. Thank you. Great response.
It’s definitely nice to have the hard copy. I don’t know if it’s still available. When I was there in 2017, I think that it had been out of print for a while. The AFT has the ebook only.
Edit: no, it seems that the ebook isn’t suitable for printing according to the information page on the AFT.
The last hard copy of Richards Journal is with this fellow human being
I managed to print a hard copy of Peter’s Journal and it came out pretty decent…My guess is that if the hard copy print of Richard’s Journal doesn’t come out perfect, but its still worth it…both Richard’s Journal and Peter’s Journal are beyond compare…absolutely worth buying!
Right.
If ‘i’ was never real, then there would be no pain, suffering, malice and sorrow.
Hypothetically, if I had been born without a ‘self’ , suffering would never had happened. Sure, physical pain or damage could still have happened, but “life sucks” wouldn’t have arisen, as there would be no ‘where’ for it to ‘be’.
This was a big part of this year’s exploration of ‘self’ with shrooms. I had simply assumed that the ‘oneness’ of ‘being’ was a thing. That the psychic web of actualism, the “real world” was the spiritual world of ‘unity’.
There is no spiritual world of unity and oneness. There is individual instances of ‘self’ being generated. That ‘self’ takes as a premise it’s immortality, it’s oneness.
So to the point, “life sucks” is simply not a fact. However, ‘being sucks’ is a fact.
Does ‘being’ crave oblivion? Hell no! Absolutely it doesn’t. It avoids any suggestion of it demise, even going as far as agreeing with the belief it craves oblivion. Malice isn’t just what one does to others, it’s the very nature of the lie itself. ‘I’ am malice. ‘I’ would rather kill this body than ever give up my illusion of ‘being’.
Don’t know why but I expected Richard to have neater handwriting lol
I’ve seen this in myself semi recently as well. I was a bit ‘stuck,’ not making as much progress as I had been. And when I looked, I realized that every time I thought about the issues in my life, I had a perfectly air-tight explanation that sounded very smart and was backed up by sociology & philosophy about why I was unhappy and when I really looked at it, it was so air-tight that I could never be happy… after all, it’s human nature to be miserable! It was perfectly self-justifying.
But I also had that little wedge of memories of PCEs, and hearing these reports from others about what’s possible. And I realized there was a flaw in my philosophies, I was just wanting to believe them essentially because they made me feel smart, like I had all the answers about how I tick. It was a security blanket that ultimately was blocking ultimate satisfaction.
Anything that’s wrong with the universe is merely the ‘human’ measure and this measure is simply incorrect. I think it’s only the PCE that shows the facticity of this. The direct experience of perfection is undeniable in this regard. Just now ‘I’ disappeared for a bit and there was only the experience of the facticity of this perfection, it is in very air that is caressing this body, I can sense it, as in experientially taste this perfection via the senses, it is literally all around as a fact.
Like Richard says, fortunately all those philosophies and psychologies no matter how air-tight are simply wrong. Isn’t that wonderful! Because it means that we are just wrong, nothing is lost, the human condition can indeed be ‘fixed’.
I mean it makes sense that the ‘human’ measure is wrong, it‘s like some instinct ridden cave man looked at the world and said - ‘bad place’, based on a completely ignorant view of what the universe is. We are now living the wisdom of these ancestors.
One question for you, is it really the senses that sense it? Or the apperceptive / existential sense, that informs of the perfection? Or both haha.
