Hunterad's journal

[hunterad]

@Vineeto

It seems you have lost/ overcome your various worries about being naïve and are discovering how easy it is to live naïvely (being “sincerely benign’). In hindsight, it’s such an easy thing to do and yet all the dire warnings of the serious sophisticates make it out to be something dangerous, ridiculous or even contemptible. They say: “Don’t have too much fun, it’s bad for you”.

Yes, it’s fascinating to think about how myself and the other ‘serious sophisticates’ tick. Why would we choose to experience life in such a serious way? It feels like at least partly it is a way to ‘get back at’ life or people. Like I am unwilling to improve things if it has to be me changing, because why should I have to change when others are just as bad or worse? Or why should I enjoy things as they are when they could be better?

@Vineeto

In actualism, being happy and harmless are two aspects of the same condition – you cannot be happy unless you are also harmless and you cannot be genuinely harmless unless you are also happy.

@Vineeto

Happiness can only “be seen as something that happens to me” when you are solely focussing on a conditional happiness, which is dependent on certain events and circumstances, whereas you have the option of feeling good, each moment again, delighting in the awareness of being alive in this very moment, which is unconditional.

I think for me personally, I understood these things at an intellectual level all along, but I still mixed up what I was aiming at when it came to happiness a bit more than harmlessness. It wasn’t as blatant as looking for happy circumstances. More like ‘if I follow the actualism steps then I will be happy’. Something between enjoying and appreciating life here and now and chasing happy external circumstances.

@Vineeto

I understand why you make this distinction but when you understand that being happy and being harmless is one and the same condition then many of your prior concerns regarding pacificism, putting the other before oneself or similar moral connotations fall by the wayside. When you are happy in an unconditional way – because you have dealt with the obstacles to being happy – you are automatically harmless, and should you feel not harmless you can equally explore why not and deal with the cause right then and there. In that way your “harmless intentions” can never develop into a moral/ moralistic principle.

I think this is a good point, and it could be easy to mistake what harmlessness is about in subtle ways similar to how I would sometimes misunderstand what happiness is about… so looking for that feeling/attitude which is both at once is key.