Harmlessness

Actualism
121

Yes the controller “I” does have this vivid experience of being in control. But if you do lean just a little hard, with some effort admittedly as it is not a very natural inclination, into what is technically, factually the case regarding who controls what, then the controller “I” does tend disappear out of the equation, to varying degrees, for however long and to whatever extent you are able to remain aligned with that technicality.

And here’s the other curious bit, you can even discover or come upon a paradoxical simultaneity where “I” in all its glory (and disgrace) can exist alongside that wondrous technicality. Indeed, “I” exist. And it is that wondrous technicality that birthed “me,” sustains “me,” and will eventually end “me” precisely when and as it sees fit to do so. Neither before nor later.

As Richard said in the video with Vineeto:

“He” didn’t become redundant, “he” realized “he” was redundant.

122

The more enjoyment and appreciation, the merrier. You won’t find me arguing with that, Henry.

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Do you experience this?

124

Yes :+1:

125

Is what you’re describing an excellence experience, or something else?

126

Couldn’t describe it as an excellence experience as that, per actualism terminology, involves a perpetual state of enjoyment and appreciation. And I can’t say that that’s the case for me. So, it must be something else. I suppose it can be easily dismissed as an “ASC.” But I arrived here by being utterly sincere. By staying with facticity wherever it would take me:

Richard: Sincere/Sincerity: The word ‘sincere’ can be traced back to the Latin sincerus, meaning ‘whole’ or ‘pure’ or ‘sound’, and which is arguably derived from the roots ‘sin-’ (one) and ‘crescere’ (to grow) in that the Latin ‘sincerus’ originally referred to a plant which was of pure stock – not a mixture or hybrid – and thus came to mean anything which was genuine (as in ‘true’ or ‘correct’) and not falsified, adulterated, contaminated. Sincerity is to be in accord with the fact/being aligned with factuality/ staying true to facticity (as in being authentic/ guileless, genuine/ artless, straightforward/ ingenuous).
Sincere

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What does the hedonic tone of these experiences tend to be?

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Definitely on the positive. It’s an utter relief to come upon this underlying and overarching perfection. To walk hand in hand with it. Yet “I” am still paradoxically in this “imperfect” place. But thankfully it isn’t the ultimate. It is neither “me” nor imperfection that underlies everything.

It’s my awareness of that technical (factual, actual) perfection that imbues a positive hedonic tone. But like most experiences, there is mixed emotion, as I’m also simultaneously aware of the imperfect world, and that can cause distress.

Nothing is going wrong, even when everything is going “wrong.”

What I would prefer to have happen at this point is for the perfection of the universe to completely consume “me” and “my” imperfect world. I would like it to end “me” so that only the perfection exists. But I’ve been put in “my” place, as it were. The perfection will consume “me” when it’s good and damn well ready.

1 Like
129

Your perpetual state is that you don’t have a controller, your affect varies but is largely positive, but not necessarily enjoyment & appreciation? How long has this been the case?

When you say ‘positive’ do you mean loving & affectionate feelings, or a more colloquial meaning?

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No, this [simultaneity] is my perpetual state, and is what you asked me about:

There are times when there is no controller or when the controller is diminished to an extreme degree, but that is by no means the normal, persistent experience.

Yes, affect still varies and is mixed. However, there is now a new cause that has been introduced into the mix that imbues joy, satisfaction, happiness, immense relief, vigor, enrichment, celebration, and a newfound depth of appreciation. Yet it is not consummate in my experience, so I am still liable to be pulled into distressing feelings over ordinary things. But even then, at the worst of the worst, because of this increasingly intimate knowledge and awareness of that wondrous technicality: Nothing is going wrong, even when everything is going “wrong.”

August 2021

Positive hedonic tone or positive emotional valence.

Valence or hedonic tone, is the affective quality referring to the intrinsic attractiveness/“good”-ness (positive valence) or averseness/“bad”-ness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation. The term also characterizes and categorizes specific emotions. For example, emotions popularly referred to as “negative”, such as anger and fear, have negative valence. Joy has positive valence. Positively valenced emotions are evoked by positively valenced events, objects, or situations. [special emphasis on this last line]
Valence (psychology) - Wikipedia

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Hmmm just a brief objection here (I’m sure you look forward to all my objections by now :wink:)

From what I can observe , you certainly believe yourself to be sincere and to be staying with facticity come what may. This self-belief in your own sincerity pervades almost every one of your posts.

However if you step back a bit maybe you can see that you only stay with facticity when the facts are suitable for you, and otherwise you are happy to abandon facticity.

What I mean is that when you receive information that confirms what you already think is a fact, you are open, receptive, praising of the participants that provided this information, etc. But when you receive information that is contrary to what you already think is a fact, you aren’t welcoming of it, you aren’t receptive of it, you only take from it what you already agree with, etc.

In short you aren’t staying with facticity (as in what is factually true in an objective sense) so much as staying with your own beliefs of what is a fact… which is to say you are simply staying with beliefs.

And it’s not accidentally so, or that you haven’t thought much about it — they have become deeply entrenched beliefs that are impossible to dislodge via discussion (as the length of the feeling vs fact thread demonstrates).

Plus there’s a mild evangelical element where you want others to also accept your beliefs, hence posting and convincing on the forum, even sometimes in (at least mildly) deceptive/tricky ways (like the 1984 author redacted post, redacting not only the author put also critical aspects of their report, and setting it up the post so that anybody who looks into it more deeply and posts something to the contrary would be automatically labeled dismissive).

A good comparison might be to a certain type of flat earth believer. I’m talking not of a wackjob or lunatic, but someone who says they only believe what their senses tell them. From personal observation it looks like the earth is flat. From experiments you can perform easily to try to figure it out, it looks flat. They dismiss anyone telling them the earth isn’t flat because they haven’t seen it using their own senses. Such an approach certainly seems principled… they are just being utterly sincere with what they experience.

However what reveals their real position is that they refuse to do the experiments that they can do, that would show the earth is round. Or when they do do one and it does show the earth is round they assume they did it wrong. So they aren’t just being an equal opportunity “I follow the facts” with regard to the earth’s shape… they follow some “facts” more than others :smile:.

In which case I strongly urge you to pierce your own self-believed bubble of apparent sincerity, ideally by having a PCE where you can see what ‘Rick’ has been getting up to in full clarity, so you can then:

  1. Determine for sure whether the perfection you currently experience is actually the perfection of the actual world (ie pure intent), because there is ample evidence from what you write that it isn’t.
  2. Decide which one you actually want for yourself.
  3. And if you want the actual perfection, make a connection to that actual purity so you can follow that thread from then on, to use it to actually stay with facticity and use it to distinguish fact from belief yourself, without just having to hear about it from other people telling you what is or isn’t factual.

It is your life… do you really want to bet your life, to wager everything ‘you’ are and feel ‘yourself’ to be, without a crystal clear memory of a PCE firmly in mind? Do you want to risk possibly missing out on that freedom which Richard amply describes? Isn’t it worth taking what at most would be a mild detour if you are where you think you are, to have that confirmatory PCE for yourself? What’s the downside?

Of course if the self-belief is too strong by this point then I am sure you will safely ignore this exhortation as well :wink:.

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132

OK yes to bring it back to what you saw (before the discussion got sidetracked talking about “wondrous technicalities” and all that), the above is a clear and concise summation. It gives a good understanding of what you were looking at, and how you came to see it how you did.

You, as an adult male, in possession of your faculties, could not be much more malicious, or much crueler, than to be going up to an innocent baby :baby: and knowingly, willfully, deliberately, kicking it across the room. As you say, it’s a clearly malicious act. Because a baby is not an inanimate unfeeling thing. It’s a living thing than can experience harm. And you caused it to experience harm.

So that’s the analogy or simile. Andrew causes the baby harm, ergo Andrew is malicious. Likewise, the “self” causes the baby harm, ergo the “self” is malicious.

But you also see that consciousness, deliberateness, willfulness, knowledge-aforethought, etc, are necessary features for the act to be malicious. (If you were sleep-walking and kicked the baby, however horrendous the outcome, we couldn’t rightly say you were acting with malice.)

Right and makes sense now. Since you see the self as a harmful outcome – since suffering is caused by the existence of self – then forcing a self onto a baby is a horrendous act of cruelty.

But then who or what is forcing “self” upon babies? Is it not blind nature acting unconsciously and thus non-maliciously? No denying it’s a horrendous ordeal.

I suspect I agree with the position you took up that in some sense it ultimately doesn’t matter whether the act is done deliberately or not, maliciously or not, the damage is being done. Harm is being caused. Goes back to your observation about ancient peoples seeing malice in natural events. Doesn’t matter much. A 7 year old girl two days ago was abducted by a 31 year old 6’3" FedEx delivery man. Almost certainly raped her before killing her and discarding her lifeless body. A torturous, horrible end to her short life (her parents had been arguing in the house, and so she was waiting outside until the domestic strife would calm down). Is it any more awful than had she somehow slipped into an operating meat grinder? Or caught a disease that destroyed her organs while producing incomprehensible pain? Perhaps so. As a father, I would choose the latter ways of going than to have my daughter cruelly violated like that. The malice ontop of the horrendous incident makes it that more horrendous.

It’s bad enough that floods, famine, and disease cause so much damage and heartache. It’s even worse when it’s being done because the gods are being angry or spiteful. Or maybe not. Because you can potentially appease an angry god. Bargain with it. Get on its good side. You can’t do that with something blind and unconcious. No chance for negotiation, no ability to bargain; nothing to appease. In another sense, it can be even more unsettling that way.

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In this particular case of a baby being kicked, deliberateness is enough to be considered as a malicious thing to do…

…but I think there could be instances where deliberateness etc isn’t enough to be considered a malicious action…for example in some situation of self-defense perhaps…This can get a bit tricky though - for an actually free person, an act of self-defense will not be malicious but for a feeling being who in the instance of self-defense generates harmful feelings(very likely) lol

btw, I think many would know this but there is a word for such kind of criminal intent in the legal world…sounds much cooler with the whole latin name :grin:

Mens Rea refers to criminal intent. The literal translation from Latin is “guilty mind.” … A mens rea ​ refers to the state of mind statutorily required in order to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime…Establishing the mens rea of an offender is usually necessary to prove guilt in a criminal trial. The prosecution typically must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the offense with a [culpable state of mind]

Justice Holmes famously illustrated the concept of intent when he [said] “even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.”

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134

There certainly needs to be intent to be considered malicious / harmful. This is how the universe can be factually correctly said to be benevolent even though there are things like tornadoes and hurricanes that destroy houses and kill people. There is no malicious intent behind said forces of nature.

The tricky parts in this discussion seem to center around the nature of ‘intent’, whether a blind malicious action/reaction ‘I’ have can construe intent. Whether a lion’s intent to kill a deer can be considered malicious, etc. It comes down to choice. If I have no choice then it’s just the universe manifesting as me. With no free will, nobody is culpable, or guilty or responsible, it’s just what it is.

To me this is just obviously a tremendous cop-out :slight_smile: . A way of avoiding recognizing that ‘I’ am rotten and that ‘I’ can do something about it (self-immolate). A surrendering to my fate, instead of escaping my fate and achieving my destiny (as Richard puts it).

It’s not to be conflated with letting go of the controls, which is where I let the universe as pure intent live me. This is where I let go of the controls to let something outside of ‘me’ take over. Rather, what’s being talked about here ^ with having no control over what ‘I’ do, is ‘me’ giving up ‘my’ egoic autonomy to surrender to ‘my’ soul and let ‘me’ as ‘soul’ run rampant. It’s literally giving the arsonist a can of gasoline and a lighter and free reign to do whatever he wants. I don’t recommend it!

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@rick

I am glad you acknowledge that it doesn’t really matter about the “who dunnit” part of the equation. Blind Nature can be a scapegoat too.

There was however, conscious human beings who continued to reproduce whilst, to some degree, knew they didn’t have the answer to their own suffering, yet still proceeded to bring us into the world. Of course, that would be blaming parents, but I think the collective, however dim, awareness involved in that choice constitutes the requirements for any definition of malice.

In that, since time immemorial, humans have to some degree been aware of their own suffering, “blind nature” in humans isn’t completely blind, and thus has acted maliciously. If indeed one needs a conscious intention to fulfil one’s chosen definition of “malice”.

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136

There does seem to be a difference between “choice” and “free will”.

Something I saw a week ago was that what we experience as “choice” regarding feelings is not about an event like a crossroads, but more like choosing which part of a kebab I will eat first. It’s a matter of time. When I feel something, rather than switching between two roads.

Which lines up with the actualism method. I was (in the recent past) feeling good. I am not feeling good now, one getsback to feeling good.

One is manipulating the psychological timeline. As ‘time’ (past, present, future) are an illusion, one can essentially go back and forward on this timeline without there being any need for proper “free will” which implies a will without any conditions.

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I didn’t quite get the rest, but yea there’s no such thing as “free will” absent of any external conditions. The only way you know you’re alive is cause of the senses. Any decision you make is contingent upon the needs, information, desires, will, etc., of the moment. You can’t escape being alive in order to make some sort of abstract decision. Nor would it be possible cause if it’s in a vacuum then there’s no considerations that need to be made.

You can think of actual freedom as a “freed will”, freed from the feeling-being’s rough and ready survival package, in favor of a more evolved more intelligent package that can not only survive better, and be better for the species, but also have an absolute blast being alive in the process.

With that all being said even if there’s no “free will” in a vacuum, you still do have a “will” in context, so you can decide which way you go and what feelings you will want to feel etc.

I think the only really hard part of all of this is actually seeing it is up to ‘me’. Just think of what a huge blow this is to your sense of being a special self. The most horrible things you ever felt or thought or did, was actually up to ‘you’ doing it! You’re not a ‘good person’ that slipped but redeemed themselves… you are that rotten and awful feeling-being, at your very core. It is just difficult to own up to this. Have to be willing to take that hit. It takes time to get to that point. For me I was able to see it more and more (and still more and more as I go) by seeing that I had no choice but to do so if I wanted to get any closer to what the PCEs and EEs show me. I would rather take the hit than be locked out of paradise forever :slight_smile:

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Yes, agreed. A will freed from the dictates of the human condition will still prefer and willfully persue that which suits the human involved.

Vineeto prefers to sleep in. Richard wants his bedside table to be configured a certain way, etc.

The bit about “choice” was me seeing that I am never creating ‘feelings’ out of thin air. They already ‘exist’ in psychological ‘time’. My awareness is moving over this timeline and tuning into the preferred feeling, not creating it.

The difference for me was that when I feel less than good, I can ‘move’ backwards to when I did feel good. I don’t have to dig myself out, or desperately create something.

139

Yes. This is the first day I can honestly say I have seen this. It was always ‘me’.

I think what tripped me up was the condemnation and blame associated with being at fault. It’s not just those like me raised in religion who get hell fire heaped on their heads.

Which is about the “fundamental attribution error” psychology talks about.

When I get to work on time, it’s because I am a good punctual person. When I am late, it’s the traffic at fault.

When my coworker gets to work on time, it’s because that’s what they are meant to do. When they are late, it’s because they are a lazy, bad worker.

I remain “special”. Which is what all those who preceded us believed about themselves.

When the child misbehaves by being angry and malicious, it a “bad boy”,

When the parents get angry and lash out, it’s because the “children are little shits”.

This being “special” is then another aspect of ‘self’.

The cunning part?

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Which is a curious circular thing. ‘selves’ seem to be fundamentally “special little snowflakes”, but they also give other ‘selves’ this ironclad free pass via condemnation.

I condemned you, you condemned me, and we both get to remain “special”.