Drawing the line between feeling and fact

[claudiu]

@rick

Hi Claudiu - along with giving much thought to what you have written recently in posts 67, 69, & 73, I have been thinking of how to proceed with this topic to a satisfactory conclusion. The crux of the issue is that which was raised in my response to Srinath (above):

Your response that the cause of suffering is neither metaphysically inherent nor physically inherent (not merely physically inherited); that ‘I’ am neither a metaphysical entity nor a physical entity; that emotions can be factual [sic] but cannot be either metaphysically or physically existent, leaves very little room for proceeding forward.

Hi Rick - that’s good news as for the conversation to proceed forward to a satisfactory conclusion it first had to make a sharp turn and start to head in a different direction. Now that it is stopped we are halfway there… the question now is if the sharp turn can be successfully accomplished and we can proceed in a beneficial direction.

The following gets to the real crux of the issue:

@rick

For example, the clearest PCE that I can recall did not inform me that the emotions and self that preceded it were ever illusory or lacked substantial existence, only that they were not existent at the time of the PCE.

That is, even though you had a PCE in which emotions and the self were absent, you haven’t yet grasped that emotions and the self are in fact illusory and lack substantial existence – and as such the self cannot be an entity (as in something that actually exists) per se, be it a physical or a metaphysical one.

Now the illusion that the self actually exists, is an incredibly strong and persistent one… so strong that a “Man from Sydney”, for example, only fully grasped it shortly before becoming actually free [link]:

@Man from Sydney

I realised in a flash that I and all of humanity had it back to front. The actual was real and the ‘real’ was but a dream. The actual was not an ‘experience’ as I had often thought in PCE’s. This wondrous world was our rock solid inheritance. It was under our very noses and we were totally oblivious to it. Why would I want to go back to a real world that didn’t exist? How could I go back now? I thought that it could happen at anytime now.

It is such a powerful, deeply-entrenched belief, that even though I have been actively interested in actualism for ~10 years now and have seen much success and have had bucketloads of PCEs lately, I still live most of my day-to-day life under the illusion that ‘I’ am tangible, substantial, real, that ‘I’ am threatened by this and that, that ‘my’ survival is paramount, etc.

And the illusion is not just that ‘I’ exist now, but that ‘I’ existed in the past as well… yet not only do ‘I’ not actually exist now, but ‘I’ never existed in the first place. On a phone call with Richard many years ago, he said how upon becoming actually free, the experience is such that he (actually free Richard) had been there all along, even in the “past” when feeling-being ‘Richard’ was felt to exist. When I remarked that that is very strange he fully affirmed that yes, it is very strange indeed!

The human condition is such a bizarre and weird thing that newly-free Vineeto, for whom the instinctual passions and the feeling being formed thereof were already extinct, still experienced confusion and disorientation in her process of becoming fully free [link]:

@Vineeto

I had sometimes confusing and disorienting periods during this time of becoming fully free as I discovered the implications and ramifications of this infinite, eternal and perdurable universe from my original self-centric perspective, and Richard had to remind me that the human condition is weird and as such coming out of it will also be experienced as weird at times. It’s par for the course.

The issue is that you have spent much time debating and thinking about and reflecting on whether the self actually exists as a physical entity, or actually exists as a metaphysical entity. And as you have seen, correctly, that nothing metaphysical exists, you have concluded that you actually exist as a physical entity (are “physically inherent”), and therefore that the physical universe is “completely, entirely inseparable from ‘me’. No isolation, no separation, no division”.

Yet you have constructed and then fallen victim to a false dilemma, a false dichotomy, an either/or fallacy. The factual state of affairs is a third one - namely that ‘I’ don’t actually exist and never actually existed in the first place.

The problem is that as it stands now, you are completely closed off to this possibility, hence seeing “very little room for proceeding forward” when I denied both options as being the case. And instead of reading Richard’s words in the manner they were written - which is essentially as direct pointers and pin-pointed advice tailored to the specific feeling-being he was talking to to get them to see this extremely salient and critical point - you are using them to support your conclusion that has been derived from cogitation and thinking as opposed to direct experiences of actuality (i.e. PCEs). And unfortunately, if you proceed in this manner, you could read the entirety of his words three times over and still not see the point.

@rick

Diverging from the crux of the issue for a moment, one thing that is becoming clear is that a strict reliance on what a PCE informs will produce divergent positions on key issues.

And yet, with regards to this critical point - that ‘I’ do not actually exist and never did actually exist - everybody, be it me, @Srinath, @geoffrey, Richard, Craig, Vineeto, Peter, etc. etc. is in complete agreement. The words we use might be different, and we might conceive of the surrounding ontological matters in different ways, but the key point is precisely the same.

@rick

How much can the identity be entrusted with conveying information faithfully from its PCE? […]
Also bear in mind how the PCE informs different ‘self’-less bodies of different things. […]
There is thus a distinct possibility that both the suspension and immolation of ‘self’ does not, in of itself, resolve all the matters that the self-less condition professes to resolve.

And yet how, where everyone else has failed, will feeling-being ‘Rick’ succeed? How will ‘he’ see where others went wrong, without using the information from PCEs they had, which experiences show where the entirety of the billions of peoples of humankind not only alive today but that were alive in the past have gone wrong? How will ‘he’ succeed before undergoing the immolation of ‘self’, which it seems would be a prerequisite for thoroughly resolving these matters, since certainly experiencing first-hand the extinction of ‘self’ would be vital information as to the nature of said ‘self’? And if ‘he’ does want to undergo said immolation, how will ‘he’ succeed in doing so without seeing that his current position is in direct opposition to those people who have succeeded in undergoing said immolation?

I am keenly interested to see whether the conversation has successfully executed a sharp turn, and if so, whether it can start to take steps in a beneficial direction… the one leading to actuality .

Cheers,
Claudiu