Hi Adam,
Are your questions purely rhetorical, voicing the attitude of “serious sophisticates” or do you share that sentiment that “why should I have to change when others are just as bad or worse?”, for instance, or “I am unwilling to improve things if it has to be me changing”?
Just in case you have any remnants of resistance to unilaterally change, for your own benefit (and simultaneously others’ benefit), Andrew’s experiential insight can give you confirmation that it’s worthwhile doing so –
Andrew: … I have no one else to blame except my feeling reality … (link)
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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.
Adam-H: 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.
You seem now to have gained a more experiential understanding because yesterday you said –
Adam-H: It’s never felt more possible than it does right now. Sincerity is the key to naivete – when I am sincerely benign, the need to control myself fades away. Without the pressure to control myself, life is an easy and fun affair. (link)
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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.
Adam-H: 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. (link)
Yes, whilst you aim to be feeling good, i.e. maximise the felicitous and innocuous feelings, the actualism tools to reach your aim are to facilitate removing the obstacles that are in the way of feeling good. Once the obstacle (either a ‘good’ or bad feeling or an insalubrious belief or habit) is removed you are automatically back to feeling good.
In other words, you don’t have to create feeling happy or feeling harmless – it happens when you remove what is preventing you from feeling happy and harmless.
Richard: Purity is an actual condition, intrinsic to the perfection of the infinitude of this universe … the only one we have. A human being can tap into this purity by pure intent. Pure intent can be activated with sincere attention paid to the state of naiveté. To be naive is to be virginal, unaffected, unselfconsciously artless – in short: ingenuous. Naiveté is a much-maligned word, having the common assumption that it implies gullibility. Nevertheless, to be naive means to be simple and unsophisticated. Pride is derived from an intellect inured to naive innocence; to such an intellect, to be guileless appears to be gullible, stupid. In actuality, one has to be gullible to be sophisticated, to be wise in the ways of the real world. The ‘worldly-wise’ realists are not in touch with the purity of innocence; they readily obey the peremptory decrees of the cultured sophisticates. A sample of such decrees are: ‘I didn’t come down in the last shower’, or ‘I wasn’t born yesterday’, or ‘You’ve got to be tough to survive in the real world’, or ‘It’s dog eat dog out there’ … and so on. Such people are said to have ‘lost their innocence’. Human beings have not ‘lost their innocence’ – they never had it in the first place. (Richard, List A, No. 26).
Cheers Vineeto