Investigation

Yes I agree that the critical choice with any emotion is, ‘is it silly’ / ‘why is it silly,’ and I’ve wondered before if/why that was easier for Richard to arrive at than it has been for me and others at times. If it can be arrived at relatively immediately then it saves a lot of time

Seems to me that we are overcomplicating things here. As I posted earlier, there are different functions for different needs: sometimes you need velocity, sometimes you need to remove obstacles. It’s a just a toolkit and you use whatever tool you think is sensible at any given time, right?

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Ok, I’ve determined that the issue is that ‘pure contemplation’ can only take place with no ‘thinker,’ aka when ‘I’ am in abeyance, aka in a PCE. If you are doing all of your investigation from the position of PCE then that is excellent, but it isn’t likely for most people most of the time.

Pure Contemplation is a wonderful thing and the more the better, but as long as I’m not in a PCE I’ll continue trying to figure things out via any means necessary - from the position of feeling as good as possible.

edit:

Perhaps Reflective contemplation is a better descriptor for the state you’re describing @Kiman

Diligent attention paid to the peak experience ensures pure intent continuing to operate. With pure intent running as a ‘golden thread’ through one’s life, reflective contemplation – not meditation – rapidly becomes more and more fascinating. It is a matter of coming to one’s senses – both literally and figuratively – and one does this by understanding that only this moment is actual. When one is totally fascinated, reflective contemplation becomes pure awareness … and then apperception happens of itself. With apperception operating more or less continuously in ‘my’ day-to-day life, ‘I’ find it harder and harder to maintain credibility. ‘I’ am increasingly seen as the usurper, an alien entity inhabiting this body and taking on an identity of its own. Mercilessly exposed in the bright light of awareness – apperception casts no shadows – ‘I’ can no longer find ‘my’ position tenable. ‘I’ can only live in obscuration, where ‘I’ lurk about, creating all sorts of mischief. ‘My’ time is speedily coming to an end, ‘I’ can barely maintain ‘myself’ any longer.”

@Kiman

Was it you I spoke with on the phone a couple of years ago?

One should also remember that Richard was an artist. A Potter.

One is not particularly cognitively engaged when working with one’s hands. I know, because I spent years as a tradesman. It’s easy to just automatically do the work and think about whatever you want to.

So, 14 hours of work, is 8 hours of thinking, allowing for the times one has to think about the work.

Office work isn’t like this at all. There’s a lot of cognitive involvement.

Richard also had both the 4 hour PCE and a 24 hour Peak Experience* with his then wife (mother of his 4 children), and they had started together. She didn’t last long, before she was actively against it.

Nothing like being actively scorned and tested to get one’s resolve hardened!

Edit: for what it’s worth, when I was 26 I also was working long days (up at 5am, building my house, going to work, coming home and working on the house, raising 2 kids, with 1 on the way) and I managed to get into “illuminated” territory. I was very much into something I would call “layers”. I believed that what one fears is what one needs to love. So I would investigate a layer of fear, until I got to a layer of love.

Within a few months friends would comment on the “charisma” coming off me. I would walk around in “unity” states.

Getting into enlightenment territory, at least the foothills, isn’t that hard.

Also, Richard wasn’t doing the actualism method as advertised, as he wasn’t minimising love. Love was mistakenly included in what he was maximising. Hence, enlightenment.

*I believe that the 24 hour peak experience is where the “sex dripping from the walls” description comes from. It could have been an EE, or ASC…I can’t recall.

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Further, after the 1982 enlightenment, and the break up of his marriage, and with the youngest child leaving after he had raised them as a single dad, he spent 5 years sussing out, investigating et al, in what he calls his “puritan period”. Alone, celibate, itinerant, living on islands etc.

He travelled to India around this time with his daughter. All the while investigating, pondering, writing, talking.

I would argue that Richard did more investigation than this entire list put together!!

And then, as others pointed out, another 7 years living and investigating with Devika.

So, if there is a short cut, it’s reading the AFT thoroughly and gleaning as much from those already investigated topics, and see how they may apply to your particular circumstances and conditioning et al.

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emphasis added.

I reread the thread, and saw that desire at your workplace is not the issue at all.

You definitely have something to investigate.:rofl:

Is there anyone here arguing against investigation? I only browse, I’m a browser but I haven’t noticed anyone arguing against investigation. Yet I keep reading replies insisting that Richard did investigate. Of course he did.

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Kiman believes that he can go straight to minimising desire (around maximising profit at work), without investigating the reason he is at work at all, it would seem.

I don’t think anyone doubts that Richard investigated all sorts of things. What I think @Kiman is getting at is, how much investigating did he do to avoid feeling bad? The answer is nothing:

Dona: for clarification, Richard was out-from-control virtually free, which is a shift, a “different way of being”. He said he only had one instance of “slipping back to normal”, which only lasted a few minutes, and he didn’t do anything to get back to being out-from-control.

It seems from your question you might be referring to “in control” virtual freedom, where someone is feeling good at this moment, and each moment again for the rest of​​ their lives. Richard skipped right over this, and right into “out from control” virtual freedom.

Alan: Richard lived the out-from-control virtual freedom for about 9 months before losing his ego and becoming enlightened for 11 years. It is not necessary​​ to become out-from-control before becoming actually free (see Dona’s reply below).

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And yet, it has been retrospectively named “out-from-control”, as in one step from actual freedom, whilst the result was the delusion of enlightenment. So, accurately speaking, he was under-the-control of…Love.

Why else would he have to regain his “surrender” all those years later?

Frankly, Richards way of doing it, as in what he did in 1981, is bound to lead to enlightenment.

In fact, as he is the only one to have practiced his method, and the result was enlightenment, then the data is exactly 1 for 1.

Which is why the “direct route” was formulated. Even then, both Peter and Vineeto, (and others since) had enlightenment experiences (without permanent loss of ego).

Craig may have replicated Richard’s 1981, “no investigating required” method, (going straight for the PCE experience whilst never looking at identity issues), and many here regard him as not actually free, but something else.

Perhaps we bring back the “indirect method” and all get enlightened. Then, go beyond.

:rofl:

This seems to be true. If Richard had also minimised good feelings, why did he end up enlightened in 1981? (But then his having a strong pure intent means he would minimize good feelings, or may be he just wasn’t attracted to good feelings but was suddenly hit by massive doses of love and compassion just before he enlightened?)

If that is so, how can Richard say he was in out-from-control virtual freedom in 1981 preceding his enlightenment?

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Yes. Afaik, he didn’t investigate the way we investigate. His success in investigation was not a condition for him to be happy. There was no element of compulsion to succeed in investigation. Not investigating was not an obstacle. His objective was to recreate PCE and everything else took a back seat.

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At the time there was no AFT or any actually free people or other actualists to rely on :smiley:

Richard explained it , that while maximizing the felicitous feelings, and being naivete, love persistently emerged. There was no precedent so no way for him to know that love was leading in a different direction. Found the quote:

And he went into more detail here:

I was also surprised to learn that Beauty remained with him until he became actually free! Not only that but he didn’t even expect that Beauty would disappear along with everything else. Found a quote:

So you don’t have to know everything to become free :slight_smile: .

It should be clear to everyone Richard did do the “method”. The “method” is literally a report of what worked for him. He didn’t just come up with it later as something he didn’t do. The entire text of the AFT is essentially reports, descriptions, experiences – not narratives, prescriptions, or worldviews.

But, while applying the method, he veered off in the totally opposite direction, due to the reasons detailed above. Who of us can say they didn’t veer off in a wrong direction while they were successfully applying the method? :wink:

Well, he was out from control… until love/enlightenment ‘kidnapped’ him haha (my words not his).

Ya you are getting the idea now. Recreate the PCE :slight_smile: that is the idea. The reason the method is to maximize the felicitous feelings is that they are the closest, knowing imitation of the PCE. So the method is sourced in the PCE.

Indeed it should be pretty obvious pretty early on that investigating while feeling bad doesn’t really work. The question then that is begging to be asked is, why keep doing it? :smiley:

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So to summarise the events of 1981, there was an initial period of maximised Felicious feeling, which was “increasingly overshadowed by the insistent emergence of love…”.

Thus, to this day, no one has become actually free without investigation.

@Kiman , back to you.

Did you read my post regarding what you otherwise could be investigating?;

Obviously, the desire at work is just the tip of the iceberg on what is really going on.

From what you wrote, you are only at work because it is required “for the future spouse for me to have a job”.

How come you ignored the rest of the sentence?!!
Besides them, there are also other reasons like to keep up the social relations, if I have children the amount of security my partner will want for the children, to have more comfortable life, to not be bothered about budget etc.

@Kiman

Ah, there’s the point.

It’s not why I ignored the rest of the sentence, but rather why you ignored the rest of the issue?

It’s not up to me to investigate for you.

But hey, it’s either help you, or Netflix, and I chose you.

So, this all comes down to what another person ( who I assume isn’t in your life) may want from you.

Ok.

Now we know it has nothing to do with desire and profit. It has to do with you being a man. What is expected of a spouse.

Well, that can all be short cut. What is best for you?

Is a spouse want you want?

Is having children what you want?

I assume the fact you are doing all of this is “yes” to both questions.

Now we can really talk about desires!!:rofl:

Is that the only life you can imagine for yourself?

As a father I can assure you; financial security is the least of your concerns.

Bringing people into this world is another whole world. One second you are you, the next you are a “father”.

Imagine being everything you have (or wish you had) in your father?

So, the question is, who is running your life?

Who is in control?

I think it was probably both for Richard. Take this for example:

Richard: I did everything I could to be as happy and harmless (free of sorrow and malice) for as much as is humanly possible. This was achieved by first putting everything on a it-does-not-really-matter basis. That is, I would prefer people, things and events to be a particular way but, if it did not turn out like that, it did not really matter for it was only a preference. I chose to no longer give other people – or the weather – the power to make me annoyed, irritated, irked, or even peeved, if that was possible.

Maybe this allowed investigations to not be overly drawn out as there’s a clear cut goal. Plus I’d think investigations are to get at an experiential understanding (a la reflective contemplation) rather than just an intellectual one. Intellectual investigations where you’re just thinking about something in a vacuum can go on forever. My impression is that the real “getting it” or “flash of seeing” is where your ‘being’ sees it instead of just you trying to think about it.

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Richard: A sincere actualist is attentive to feelings all the time, day in, day out, whether active or resting; whether in association or on one’s own; whether there is thinking as well as perceiving or not. When attentiveness is actual, one will notice when one becomes stuck in one’s feeling patterns; it is that very noticing which allows one to back out of the feeling process and free oneself from it. Sensuousness returns one’s attention to its proper focus: if one is actualising a virtual freedom at that moment, then one’s focus will be the actual object of actualism. If one is not in virtual freedom, one’s focus will be just a straight-forward application of matter-of-fact attention itself, just a simple noticing of whatever comes up without getting possessively involved: ‘Ah, this feeling … what is it … where is it … where did it come from … what is it made up of … what is it connected to …?’

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