dear @Srinath@geoffrey or anyone else:
I saw the below from my notes:
Srinath
replied to a thread:
I think she was comparing the gaze in a PCE to her experience of gaze in altered states that occur in meditation
yeah, I don’t know how the magic eye thing worked in that way.
If anything Pamela’s comment suggests that focussing is inimical (detrimental)to a PCE, unlike Buddhist practices that focus on breath, Kasina and so on. That is something I agree with.There is an important gaze related thing though, which is maybe something you are missing.
Primarily a PCE comes about through increasing sensuosity and diminishing affect. For me (and most others as far as I can tell) sensuosity was primarily accessed through vision. It’s hard to describe it much better than Peter’s - ‘surface of the eyeballs’. There is a gentle caressing of things visually and gradually have things come alive for you in a delicious way. But this sensuosity has to keep apace with felicitousness and innocuousness - until affect as ‘I’can be let go of entirely.And it’s not a concentrated focus this seeing**;** it’s gentle, soft and moves all over the place, taking everything in
6/1/2020
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My question is that when I, FrankN, sit in front of the pond near our house, as I have reported
previously, stair at the pond and the scenery for quiet a long time ( 30 minutes + ) at the time.
I enjoy doing this and after starting this for a few minutes, and when I relax my vision and activate
delight, and the scenery gets a little blurred and things start to mesh together. But my ability to see the field of view increases tremendously and I am able to notice the slightest movement in my field of vision.
I am doing this as “PCE practice”. Am i doing this wrong and “going in the wrong direction” ?
@geoffrey and @Srinath describe quite different ways to “induce”/allow a PCE….Srinath lays out his method very instructionally/methodically (found on his Simple Actualism website) whereas Geoffrey disagrees, I believe, with the notion of being able to give instructions or a recipe (beyond the sincerity to open one’s eyes and enjoy and appreciate).
As I understand it he cannot relate to Srinath’s method.
My take is, that what is essentially required for a PCE is the combination of felicity and sensuosity. It doesn’t matter how you start as long as you get to that combination (where naïveté and wonder can flourish and something from “outside” takes over). Most people find that felicity is a much much more reliable entry point.
@Srinath’s method is somewhat of an outlier, in that he seems to have engaged sensuosity first and foremost; before then using emotional awareness to increase his enjoyment of the senses. He had an approach called “mixing” which was about modulating these variables to get the desired effect.
This approach is unusual and some others such as @geoffrey warn people off sensuosity (and the Attentiveness and Sensuousness and Apperceptiveness article as well) - as it’s easy to get undesirable emotional outcomes from “forcing” sensuosity - such as ASCs, dissociation, dread, bleakness etc. There were apparently a lot of people (such as the “AFers”) who misunderstood, misinterpreted or appropriated actualism to their own ideologies/mythologies and went down a whole bad route with that. This does not seem to have been a problem with @Srinath, perhaps because he was putting so much emphasis on checking in with himself emotionally in his approach. He also spent time actively cultivating being childlike, being playful, being naive, contemplating infinitude, and things like that.
My take is that the part of the PCE “process”, that people are most likely to leave out, is the felicity part. Many people try to focus on sensuosity and never achieve feeling good out of that, let alone a PCE. The feeling good part is absolutely fundamental. This is why I encourage people to attempt PCEs when they are already feeling good.
I realise I’ve made a lot of comments on others in this post, including Geoffrey and Srinath - the accuracy of which they can correct if I’ve mischaracterised their approaches/views here. Cheers
Your reply is beyond expectations, as always; and very helpful.
With my PCE “practice”, while staring at the field containing the pond, I do not
try to ( and I did not even thought about sensuosity ) use sensuosity for activating delight,
it just felt good to do that ( maybe because I get the slight blurring of the field and that feels
good, becasue it is different than “normal” sight
@FrankN It seems like your practice was more of a meditative or focussing exercise than something that would make a PCE happen.
It looks like you’ve taken something I said out of context. I was responding specifically to a question by @edzd asking me about what Pamela meant in one of the DVD videos by ‘no focus’. It was speculative and not something I intended to be used as instructions for having a PCE. There was another speculative thread started by Alan in May 2021, about the use of magic eyes to induce PCE’s. For now, just forget all that.
I think it’s important not to see PCE practice as a ‘gazing’ or an ‘optical’ phenomena as you would in meditation. Sensuous appreciation, comes as a natural by product of feeling good and enjoying/appreciating this moment of being alive. An explicit focus on sensuosity in turn enhances feeling good. And so it builds and builds. Maybe with this in mind, you can re-read the instructions for a PCE in Simple Actualism. You can’t leave out your feelings and simply focus on the visual field or it will lead to an ASC.
I’ve said the above numerous times in Slack and here, but it bears repeating.
@Felix I’m going to see that as an invitation to tell you just what I think of your post!
IMO Geoffrey tends to focus on the big picture or the core idea - whereas I often tend to focus on technique and detail. Top down vs. bottom up. Ultimately one can and should draw from both these to have more PCE’s methinks (and with actualism in general).
That’s interesting. Never thought of my approach as an ‘outlier’. It does make me wonder ‘outlier to what?’ We’ve yet to assemble an evidence base. As far as I can see we don’t have a definite idea of what method somewhat reliably produces PCE’s and in whom. Also I can see from what you have written a few times now, that there is this mistaken idea that I am not starting with feeling good/felicity. It’s probably my fault for not emphasising it more. I’ll write a correction in Simple Actualism soon.
I suspect though that this isn’t about what I’ve written, but the fact that most people who turn up on these shores implicitly have a meditative paradigm in mind and default to that.
When I first wrote these PCE guides back in the day, I realised that despite my baseline being largely good or better at the time, I had scant success with PCE’s. Other forum members were in a similar position. Focussing on sensuosity and wide eyed wonder, was what I had been neglecting and these were game-changers for me.
Agreed, and I’m assuming a felicitous starting point too.
Thank you Srinath for taking the time to explain this in details.
I wanted to add that while doing this, I was doing HAIETMOBA and EAATMOBA for most of the time
and was aware of my feelings and my surroundings at all times
Felix: I’m going to see that as an invitation to tell you just what I think of your post!
@Srinath I guess the best way to engage people on here is to tell them what you think they think!
Just to be clear, my post wasn’t a commentary on the validity of your approach compared to anyone else. I was trying to say that as long as one ends up with that winning combo of feeling good + sensuosity, it doesn’t seem to matter what the method was.
As for your approach specifically, it seems from your writings that you emphasised sensuosity as a factor more explicitly than some others - that’s all I was getting at there. I’ve not heard others describe such a methodological approach to sensuosity as this:
Srinath: Most often it is easiest to start with the eyes, let your eyes fall gently on whatever is in your purview. Have them ‘caress’ whatever is around you that is appealing. It might be the blue sky, a tree, a pebble on the ground, a bowl on your desk. See with the very ‘surface of the eyeballs as it were’. Initially, there may be only one or two things that produce sensuous pleasure. See if you can gradually take pleasure in seeing other things. Bring the other senses into it – hearing, touch, taste, smell. Hearing and touch especially. You want your whole body to be caught up with the pleasure of the senses. If you get any worries or anxieties, see if you can set them aside. If they are persistent you may need to spend a little time examining them before you dispatch them, but do so without too much effort. The idea is to get back to sensuosity.
I’m not suggesting you weren’t feeling good or that the importance you placed on sensuosity was wrong in any way.
The “back and forth” between you and Srinath on this topic has been very helpful to me
and it also relieves a lot worries and doubts (because we can come here and ask our questions
rather than being “stuck” on one thing.
On a different note, Enjoying and Appreciating this Only Moment of Being Alive
has been working better for me ; because it reminds me how precious this moment is and
i need to choose wisely as to how make sure that i enjoy and appreciate it …
@Felix Fair enough. Guess I should be more explicit about the feeling side of things in my writings then. Maybe I was taking it a little too much for granted that this was understood.
To be honest when I read your whole PCE page it seems very feelings based.
I wasn’t criticising anything about what you write to do with PCEs. Just trying to give @FrankN a little summary, probably with some of my own biases thrown in
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share that last evening, from 8 to 11 p.m. I experienced “feeling good”, this was
so lite and enjoyable, that I don’t remember feeling like that before. I knew then, that I wanted to feel at least this good for the rest of my life. I don’t know how it came on, but I had been applying the method all day, and took Richard’s advise to notice " this moment of being alive" to “activate felicity”. Once this “feeling good” came on, I kept repeating to myself "feeling good, feeling good… " and it seeped into everything that I was doing, it was very bold and noticeable, it had a definite enjoyable taste and flavor, and it lasted until I went to sleep.
This was great and very helpful for me, because now I know, that the method and Actualism is doable, experienceable, and “delivers the goods”.
When I woke up this morning, I could only find about 20% of that feeling good and all day I “tried” and was able to at best get to 50% of that feeling good level. I had read _hunterad’s posts and various replies to him, as to how to reactivate feeling good ( and that was helpful as well). But by the afternoon I felt “emotionally tired”, maybe as Felix has suggested the “feeling being” needs some rest from the method, sometimes maybe ?- but I have kept trying and am not motivated to do much else, ( unnecessary stuff ), other than doing actualism stuff ( I should be applying the method along with that, no ? , I keep forgetting ).
The process is hard, but the gains and the rewards seems well worth it, experientially and anecdotally , so thanks everyone.
I also found this said by an actualist:
The seeing that it is this moment of being alive automatically makes ‘me’ feel felicitous feelings. It was also this approach that Richard responded to saying that it delineated the difference between caused and un-caused enjoyment. Further to that, it has been my experience that if you consistently stay with that seeing (which can also potentially devolve into “living in the present” if no attentiveness is applied) then a PCE will inevitably occur.
Attentiveness ( cognitive of this moment ) is – the fascination – of – the reflective contemplation –
that this moment is one’s only moment of being alive – and one is never alive at any other time than now.
Attentiveness – leads to – > Sensuousnes
cognative >>>>>>>> pre-emotional fidelity
Sensuousness ( nonaffective awareness of this place ) is – the wondrous awareness – of
– the marvel of being here – now at this moment in time and this place in space.
A report about : 1.) applying the method and 2.)an emotional insight :
1.) For applying the method,
because it is hard for me to keep my attention on TMOBA,
I have been repeating to myself silently ( like an internal mantra ), while being aware and activating sincere intent, for several weeks now:
“Enjoying and Appreciating This Moment of Being Alive” and
" How Am I Experiencing This Moment of Being Alive"
This has been helpful to help me be attentive(ness) and also increasing my good feelings and
also has led to coming into contact with some( a lot more than the usual, and a lot more subtle )
bad feelings … which I have been able to “tolerate” more and see the “silliness” of some or
most of them.
2.) For the insight part:
As I was sitting in my usual spot today, looking around and applying ( trying ) the method as above with some moderate results, All of Sudden, I noticed 2 Lizards ( one smaller than the other), interacting with one another in all kinds of funny manners ( posturing, chasing, walking on all 4 limbs with the body elevated off the ground, etc. etc.) and I felt a very warm and safe feeling observing this interaction. And I said to myself this is very happy, playful and safe place to be at, just like inside of me, and I felt Happy and Safe inside( naivete ? ) and was able to carry that feeling on and off for several hours into now. It is a very easy feeling to remember and “presentiate” and this maybe my “silver clew” into being able to find the Happy and Harmless place inside of me.
Upon this realization, I now feel that “I” can tolerate looking at my bad feelings, and
knowing that it is ultimately a safe and happy place ( I hope so ), I am more willing and able ( and feel like I am learning for the first time ) to go inside of me, in search of becoming more and more unconditionally happy and harmless.
A big part of my progress, has been the result of reading for several hours everyday of AF material, but especially reading the posts on here, and many many interaction that I have seen take place. I really appreciate it everyone. Like I think ( Kuba) has said Actualism is the hardest thing that I have tried to get my head around and apply in my life [ and maybe that is why it’s hard, because usual life approaches do not work for applying the Actualism Method, it take Lottttsssssssss of Sincere Intent as Claudiu has said. ].
Any hints or suggestions regarding my applying the method are super welcome
I woke up at 4:30 am, and after just 2 seconds of waking up, I noticed a heavy feeling ( pressure and unpleasant ) in my abdomen. I realized that “me” has woken up, because this feeling/physical sensation
was not there until “I” came to consciousness. This may have also something to do with my circadian rhythm and my bowls( i thought about Miguel saying he: "tries to separate physical from psychological pain).
Then after a while, I remembered pelagash’s suggestion to see that there is “perfection behind those uncomfortable feelings that I am not able to name” , and that started to make things a lot better.
I got into “pleasure of perfection of this moment”, by repeating it internally and feeling it at the same time, and this was very enjoyable – but all of sudden , “I” popped out from nowhere and sent me sharp and painful feeling ( message), that "you ***** piss of s**** " don’t deserve to feel good. [ A perfect example of “Sorrow, me < Malice, me”] . And I caught it very quickly and was able to subdue it within a few seconds and went back to enjoying. I was amazed as to how sneaky this “I” am !
Then I started contemplating on “this moment” and the “Universe”. Was trying to feel the perfection and infinitude of the Universe, and suddenly I realized that the Universe is Infinite and Perfect, but “I/Humanity”, assign an “owner” to it, named “God”, just the same way we assign an “owner” called “I” to this perfect and pure flesh and blood body .
And since god is a projection of “me”, then it has sorrow/malice ( as above in “me”), so then we
have to balance god with Devil and I came up with the combined name for the two, called “Gevil” = God + Devil ( or evil ).
I went to the park this morning. At first I had a hard time “trying” to feel good, even looking at trees,
sky, the pond, the flowers, etc. was not helping at all. I was thinking about perfection of this moment and the Universe, and remembered ( henryyyyy saying: you don’t have to achieve or do anything to deserve or get to feeling good) and from nowhere, feeling good came to me, and I have been able to maintain it and carry it ( with me ), fairly well, with much less effort ( than before ).
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Written by an actualist:
The Default Mode ( of our mind )
It is useful first to reflect on some of the properties of default, standard consciousness—that is, what it’s like to be you, right now.
In this standard way of being, “you” feel as if you are the king of your mind. You are not so much your body as you are that which controls your body. You imagine yourself as, basically, a little man behind your eyes who pulls all of the levers.
This is “you” or your “ego self.”
If your experience were the solar system, this ego self would be the sun.
Everything is defined and understood in relation to it (“me”) .
In this default state, to be aware of something, it has to pass through “me” (this ego self).
With this awareness there is a sense of efforting ( that is why awareness is hard to do )—you’re trying to notice what is happening, often with dubious success,
