That’s reassuring to read!
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Peak experience report from yesterday:
“I am experiencing sensuosity off the charts today! The level of enjoyment is so high - this world is more magical and wondrous than I had ever given it credit for. I feel minimised compared to the pure enjoyment coming through the senses. Like being so awake and alive, with minimal problems! And the easy purity and intimacy with my friends and the world is indescribable. Will see how things are tomorrow but wanted to report it while it’s happening 
I’ve never experienced this in such a stable way before (7 hours in so far), and without it having the nature of being a “trip”, or an escape. It’s inherent to this earth, not a trip - and definitely nothing to escape from. Truly nothing is as it seems - and never has been. Unbelievable!”
Few other things I remember:
- The perfection experienced was a property of the world itself, including the friends I was with - everything was perfect, like being in heaven/paradise.
- I remember peoples eyes just being more indescribably jewel-like than I would ever have thought possible. Looking at them in the eyes looking at me was unspeakably wondrous.
- Everything was indiscriminately interesting and enjoyable - including the fluff on my friend’s hoodie and a camera I was looking at lol. The beach and sky were also absolutely amazing as well.
- the world looked more foreign, more amazing, more unknown etc than I have ever seen over a longer time period. It’s clear reality completely obscures being able to perceive the universe as it actually is. So exciting!!
Overall I’d characterise this as an intimacy experience (my first ever), but I think it also dipped into being a PCE at some moments as well. I was interacting socially all the whole which was somewhat distracting.
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Sure! It came about whilst on a camping trip with friends.
Camping is great - no wonder it’s such an actualist activity haha. Really slows everything down - away from computers and phones media. You get to enjoy the natural world, spend long amounts of time doing virtually nothing (ie sitting in front of the fire or chilling at the beach).
Anyway, it all started at the supermarket. I had been feeling a bit foggy in my brain lol so had spent a couple of hours prior looking at my mood, looking at what was there. By the time I got to the supermarket, it really just grabbed my attention how bright and colourful everything was. It was tasty haha. Big difference from previous trips to the supermarket where I’ve reported feeling dread when trying to pursue sensuosity.
Something about the way I was looking at things made sense, and I was able to lean into that even more (not sure what the mechanics of it were it just happened). At this stage everything was just easy but nothing “special” was happening except feeling good. But I continued in this vein of enjoying sensuously and headed back to the campsite - then me and my friends decided to head to the beach.
Thats where it came on much stronger (going from inside to outside, or from one environment to a new one seems to activate my naïveté and enjoyment). I was walking along and all my friends looked perfect, and the strangers I passed by as we walked - it was as if I was in an unknown land or in heaven or something. As I looked into peoples eyes walking past us it was just incredible - there was no distance at all.
I found I was at no other space and time than exactly where I was - it was not relative to any other places or times (ie I did not feel close to the campsite or close to anything, I did not feel any anticipation of what was coming or remembrance of what had been). This moment itself was too perfect to be able to even consider or be distracted by those notions.
Later on sitting at the fire back at camp, the usual way I perceive myself relative to the environment was not present, and this lack of barrier was immensely wondrous. The world looked completely foreign to me, and nothing about what I was perceiving was hooking into a felt sense of ‘me’ at all.
I am having peak experiences more often these days but there is no technique to it that I could describe. I would say there is a “knack” that I am developing, but that’s a result of experimentation, following my instincts (that’s just an expression obviously!) and gradually failing towards it.
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Awesome @Felix, I am a little unsure on the term ‘peak experience’ as it seems to be an umbrella term for various extraordinary experiences.
I did a search on AFT and Peter wrote :
“The term ‘peak experience’ is an all-encompassing phrase … a ‘catch-all’ term for many and varied experiences, a generic term used for a wide variety of exceptional experiences, which can range from nature experiences to feelings of great love or beauty, from pure consciousness experiences to epiphanies, Satoris or full-blown Altered States of Consciousness.”
My interpretation of what you wrote here
Is that you are referring to : PCEs, EEs, heightened states of naiveté, wide eyed wonder, intimacy experiences etc?
Actually this experience came to mind when thinking about ‘peak experience’, it seems a similar flavour to what you wrote about. It’s the first paragraph of the below post, it was very extraordinary and lasted for hours, it was not a PCE but it was very special - Contemplating self-immolation
Hey @Kub933
I use “peak experience” because the various experiences I have had have varied slightly in overall quality, so I don’t want to be overly definitive about naming them in that sense. When I refer to peak experiences I am meaning either an Excellence or Intimacy Experience, or a PCE. This recent one had intimacy and perfection as the strongest elements.
I shared my report with Vineeto and she said it sounded to her like a PCE. I said that I wasn’t completely sure because of the aspect of intimacy being so prevalent - wouldn’t that mean it was an IE? I believe she said in response that PCEs can also have particular flavours. That seems right because this was definitely an experience of perfection. I would say it was dipping into being a PCE but the baseline of it was an EE which provided the stability/longevity of it.
In any case I am not too fussed about being extremely definitive when it comes to this topic. That level of distinction and exactness is important for people coming to actualism (ie understanding that it’s not about spiritual experiences or ASCs) - but I never have ASCs so it’s not really a problem for me. Excellence Experiences and PCEs are both incredible and having either is fantastic in my opinion!
I would even say that having ASCs is better than not having peak experiences at all. It shows that the person is experimenting and travelling outside the bounds of everyday experience. That being said, it’s obviously important to understand in that case that one is off track!
Re your experience you linked to - it’s just great that you are having those kinds of experiences There isn’t a better experience to be had on earth and here you are having multiple of them! And many more to come im sure
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Yes I agree about classifying the experiences which is why I was interested as to your use of the word peak experience. It seems that once purity is tasted then one knows whether an experience is on the right track, there will be different components that stand out in various degrees but they contain the same basic flavours.
It’s especially interesting what Vineeto said about different flavours of PCEs, I have wondered this in the past because it seems most of my PCEs had different components that stood out.
What I am also wondering is just as with basic actual freedom vs full actual freedom (where to a newly free individual the direct experience of infinitude might not be accessible at all times) is it that a PCE can also vary as to which components are being experienced to what degree?
It seems there is a breadth of experiences that all convey the flavour of perfection. Just going from memory now these come to mind :
- Full blown PCE’s, (even within these though it seems different components might stand out)
- What I call flashes of apperception - where for a very brief instant (usually no more than a couple of seconds) there is an experience of unmediated perception and perfection is apparent.
- Rememoration - Sometimes it seems like a memory of a past PCE is serendipitously unlocked and all of a sudden the experience of perfection and purity floods me, this is also very brief and sometimes I cannot tell if it is a memory of perfection or if it is being experienced now, I guess the answer is that the memory of perfection leads me to actually experience it now.
- These long lasting EE’s where everything is so magical and fairytale-like that it gets difficult to discern if its a PCE or not.
- Sweet intimacy experiences - Seeing that I am not separate from the rest of actuality, these always seem to convey a flavour of sweetness and safety, closest I can describe it is the first time taking MDMA! but this doesn’t really convey the magnitude of it, it is like being completely enveloped and locked in paradise.
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If you did not perceive a self, it was most likely a PCE
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Anyone know that song that goes “feeling good, like I should” 
(song; Sunday Best by Surfaces)? I always think of that in relation to actualism haha.
I wanted to write about feeling good - it’s probably the thing I’ve most neglected about actualism or have always found most difficult. I never even made the official commitment to “feeling good each moment again” because I basically just didn’t believe it was possible. I always thought it was so unfair - I wanted so badly to feel good yet I just couldn’t get it to happen. That was my perception of things at least .
The thing is though, yes I wanted/desired to feel good as a notion but what I realise now is that I was not WILLING to feel good ultimately. I was basically doubling down on existing sorrowful and malicious feelings - seeing them as impossible impediments to the feeling good which I apparently so badly wanted.
The thing is though, I was the one perpetuating those sorrowful and malicious feelings all along. I was the one that was sustaining the beliefs behind those feelings as well. Basically, I wasn’t actually willing to feel good come what may - I had so many reasons why I couldn’t, shouldn’t and wouldn’t. As a result, I also felt additionally like it was all so unfair that the actualism method wasn’t working for me!
It reminds me of this quote, which to me is just an all-time quote, from Peter - it was key to changing my attitude about the whole thing (of thinking I needed to find some secret method/technique):
As for ‘one’s grip one the method’, the main difficulty with the method is its simplicity and straightforwardness – denial and obscuration being the main tricks a social/instinctual identity employs in order to evade exposure.
It has taken me a long time and a lot of getting hit in the face and groin to finally find out that it’s possible to feel good if one is willing (as opposed to merely wanting) to do so. This does require a strong intent I think, enough to override the natural tendency of any feeling being to be malicious and sorrowful in many various ways. Now I want to prove to myself that it’s possible to feel good come what may as well. I am finally willing to commit to it!
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I feel good almost all the time. The thing I haven’t mastered is how to feel good when I am feeling bad physically.
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I feel like you are talking “at me” Felix ( or the words in your post are),
you always talking about the nitty gritty and the hard stuff ( nuts and bolts).
Very much appreciate your writing and your reports. Very very helpful!
Post more often 
By far the biggest difficult I’ve had with actualism is the part that is the most important - feeling good. It’s quite a weird instruction to give someone “just feel good”. Makes it sound very simple and then in practice, it seems nigh on impossible.
You can do so much towards actualism without the feeling good part. You can really spin your wheels and live in total confusion - warping your experience and dismantling identity without a stable feeling good for it to all make sense and validate itself as a method. I’ve never given up though, which I think is important. I have experienced so much failure and yet always been awake or open to how I might be going wrong. It has helped so much having actually free people to look to as evidence that it’s possible.
Lately, feeling good is becoming like pressing a button on an oxygen tank. It has taken a damn long time to find any sort of button, but yet here it is, for anyone to find. It’s coming in waves, sometimes feeling good is dripping through, sometimes it’s like a flood. It’s so simple and yet it was so confusing to know what to do.
Feeling good does not come from my environment. In fact there is almost no correlation! I have learnt that lesson well and truly. You can feel good trapped on a plane or feel bad on a tropical island. You can feel good when a waitress scowls at you or feel bad whilst cuddling someone. What makes the difference to experience is if I’m pressing this hidden button in the psyche, which is a genuine emotional appreciation for this moment in time, no matter what is happening. It’s a hard button to find because you only experience the positive effects once you’ve pressed it. And furthermore, it’s not an actual button - that’s just a metaphor. The more you give to it, the more it gives back. But you have to make the first move rather than stand on your own tail.
So you can be sitting there feeling bad, and wanting to feel good, and just get absolutely nowhere. And maybe even get yourself feeling worse. It has taken a lot of determination to go through that, at times, gruelling and desperate process of figuring out what to do. Also, my way of doing things has been intense and cut-throat. Just basically giving up on family, friends, social life, exercise etc as crutches. Dismantling identity when I didn’t feel good yet. Basically going all in, in the hope that intensity would make the process work - but guess what - it didn’t, it just made me stressed and panicked all the time. I don’t recommend my approach but it’s just what I did, based on how I’ve “achieved” other things.
You really need to have a stable feeling good to make the process carefree, easy, fun and frankly, for the process to even work. Otherwise you might just get lost in being attentive, being rational/logical, being detached/repressed, and all the while having to deal with new feelings of despair, loneliness, fatigue, confusion etc etc, as well as the malicious and sorrowful behaviours those feelings create. All the while berating oneself for not figuring it out.
I think oxygen is an apt metaphor for feeling good. Once you have it you realise how little you had before - it’s so benevolent - like a restorative balsam. A lifetime of upset healed at once, and with enough left over for everybody to have. It’s a very simple thing and once it’s accessible it makes you realise how bizarre it is that people don’t feel good already. And how long one has spent not feeling good in the past. It really need not be the case!
It’s so simple.
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Very interesting and helpful read Felix.
One of my main issues in the past was that when not feeling good I was searching for ways to feel good. I was searching for “objective” reasons to feel good. It sometimes felt as persuading myself into feeling good. Sometimes it worked, but more then often it didn’t.
I was coming from the direction of why I didn’t feel good, why wasn’t I able to feel good, what was I missing, what is my limitation? etc. A major insight for me was that I discovered that I just didn’t want to feel good. Plain and simple. No excuses, no theories, no rational explanation etc. I just didn’t want to. Before that I had millions of explanations why I couldn’t feel good. The answer is that I can feel good, very easily if I want to, but I don’t want to. That insight saved me a lot of time in analysing “myself” before feeling good.
The second thing I want to mention is in relation to your oxygen switch. There was a time where I thought happiness, feeling good, felicity is an outside factor and I had to somehow introduce it to me, induce it into me, open myself up to it etc. For me that was pure intent. But later on I realized that this is just plain wrong. Pure intent is merely an orientation thing to me, but that “energy” is indeed inside of me. How could it be inside of me where I was corrupt to my very core? Well, it just is. I couldn’t understand the importance of felicity which Richard stressed so much. This word didn’t do anything to me. It was when I experianced it first hand from my very inside that it made sense. It is a quality of the self, an inside quality. I looked for the meaning of the word in the German language. Here it translates as “happy/lucky soul”. This is very much how it feels to me. It is me who is happy, not some outside factor. And this me being happy is the very diminishing of my bubble. And here I can just enjoy and appreciate what is on offer.
I wonder if you or anyone can relate to that.
That switch I can’t activate at my own will at all times however. I at least have to feel “okay” to skip the messy part and go directly into felicity and thus enjoy and appreciate this moment of beeing alive.
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Yes, and when that happens it’s because “I” get something in return… It is useful to try to observe what it is.
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Can you say more about this please, Miguel ?
BTW, Felix and Elgin that was very helpful, appreciate you sharing such valuable experiences.
Felix, is that example of what “not to do” ,i.e. doing all these things without feeling good first ?
Hey Elgin By the way do we know each other or are you new to the forum? I don’t recognise the name.
I have had similar experiences to you - always supposedly wanting to feel good and never managing it - it just seemed impossible. I went more and more into my head about it, analysing things and reading and trying a million things as if this were some impossibly complicated mental landscape. The problem I think lay in my blindspot, and the blindspot of all people: the basic resentment of being alive.
I think there is a way to be really enthusiastic about actualism and really supposedly dedicated to it, without addressing the basic resentment (and thus getting nowhere fast). In that case the goal of being happy and harmless has been integrated into the social identity, yet emotionally the basic resentment still stands - hidden in the blindspot. So the person will say “I really want to feel good each moment again, but I just can’t manage to do it!” This was the case for me and I pushed myself to the brink of frustration as a result, and eventually had to admit total failure. My ambition was endless yet I could not get even close to being able to say I felt good.
Eventually I have come to locate “the basic resentment for being here” for myself, which was so much more impactful than simply reading it from Richard. Acknowledging the basic resentment is the moment when all the excuses (external reasons for why one feels bad, and imagined hopes for what will make one feel good) can be seen for that they are. I mean, even actualism can be used as a kind of escape - a hope for something better, in “another world”. That’s the exact opposite of wanting to be here - in fact it actively feeds resentment.
The actualism method really is about feeling good, wanting to be here, having fun etc. It’s no wonder identities like myself, who function psychologically in the exact opposite way, will find crafty ways to contort the simplicity of the actualism method.
The most important actualism quote for me, besides the method itself, has been the following:
Peter: As for ‘one’s grip one the method’, the main difficulty with the method is its simplicity and straightforwardness – denial and obscuration being the main tricks a social/instinctual identity employs in order to evade exposure.
That one gripped me 
!
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I think this is an interesting point and it’s something I have thought about lots before. The way I am currently seeing it is that these dead-ends are somewhat inevitable and also in the long run they are useful.
It seems like Richard was able to jump right into a proper application of the method but he was a pioneer, he saw that the PCE demonstrated what he wanted to live and he went for it boots and all, and sincerely too.
I wonder how different it is for us being more like ‘followers’ in a sense. As in we find the AFT one way or another, and after a life-time of living in the real world where nothing is genuine, we habitually approach Actualism with the same mindset of merely looking to ‘tick some boxes’ and expecting a reward, and of course we soon find that Actualism does not work like that. This seeing in itself can be huge because it shows that Actualism is 180 degrees opposite to where I have been heading my whole life.
On top of that the identity plays the various ploys in order to remain unchanged so it seems like those periods of ‘getting it wrong’ can be a very necessary and useful precursor to finally finding that which is genuine. I personally see this sorta winding path as par for the course. Because at the beginning, when all I know and all I am is duplicity, how else could I interpret this new paradigm of Actualism?
Yet after each dead-end, my fundamental nature is demonstrated over and over, which allows me to start orienting myself in a direction which is genuine. Then with each experience of purity I orient myself more away from duplicity and more towards living that which is genuine.
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