Vineeto to Pelagash: As I said above, a cognitive, rational decision to “simply do what’s sensible in a given situation” is not enough as your intelligence is manipulated and stifled by your affective faculty. Unless you acknowledge and recognize which feeling and what belief/ principle/ moral code is causing you to be “self-punishing”, this harmful attitude towards yourself will assert its dominance again and again. (7 July)
JesusCarlos: I wanted to move this here as a reminder. Especially this statement “your intelligence is manipulated and stifled by your affective faculty.” Because it is becoming increasingly clear to me that this is totally the case, and that making decisions dominated by any disturbed emotional state only produces bad results.
And I’d like to take this opportunity to share an update on my progress with the method. If it can be defined as progress, because in my experience it’s kind of a discontinuous progress. When it seems like I’ve already taken ten steps, I take six backwards, so in reality I’ve only taken four. But keep going.
Hi JesusCarlos,
Thank you for your progress report and excellent description how you go about it.
While it may look like “ten steps” forward and “six backwards”, from memory of my own experience it seems more likely that actualising one’s insights can sometimes be a gradual process because one is weening oneself off detrimental habits and attitudes by replacing it with propitious ones (for instance either to high expectations and habitually putting oneself down when you instead can enjoy observing yourself slowly but irrevocably changing and appreciate the sincerity, growing naiveté and increasing fun and confidence you gain.
After all, being naïve means liking yourself and liking others.
JesusCarlos: Something I’ve noticed has been essential to this progress is paying special attention to my way of being with my partner. I began to put special emphasis on this after reading the feedback Vineeto gave both Kuba and Claudiu regarding their definition of the primary motive that could drive their total commitment to peace on earth and trigger the process of their irrevocable psychic extinction.
I remember asking both Claudiu and Kuba the same question: “who or what do you want to give all of ‘yourself’ to?” Was this what you were referring to?
JesusCarlos: In both cases, it coincided with being able to give the closest person what they most longed for: a partner who is truly 100% considerate, attentive, and sincere. And I continue to find much fruit in channeling my emotional energies toward the most complete experience of intimacy possible with my partner. Knowing that if I achieve it there, I can achieve it with any other human being.
Whatever the case may be, you chose an excellent and delightful way “channeling my emotional energies toward the most complete experience of intimacy possible with my partner”. And because aiming for actual intimacy is an unendorsed, unsanctioned and unilateral pursuit, there is no demand or pressure on your partner to change in any way, even though an increased ability to be intimate may well entice and encourage her to similarly come out of hiding. It’s a win-win situation.
Richard: Look, the whole point of minimising both the malicious/ sorrowful feelings (the ‘bad’ feelings) and their antidotal loving/ compassionate feelings (the ‘good’ feelings) whilst maximising the felicitous/ innocuous feelings (the ‘congenial’ feelings) is to make for a potent combination when this untrammelled conviviality operates in conjunction with a naïve sensuosity – whereby one is both likeable and liking – such that the benevolence and benignity of pure intent may increasingly become dynamically enabled for one purpose and one purpose alone … to wit: for the already always existing peace-on-earth to become apparent, in this lifetime, as this flesh-and-blood body.
As your proposed making of a conscious effort to not pull back – and to allow yourself “to have a feeling of liking for others and show this feeling” (which is indeed “the same as expressing the feeling” of course) – is on track with “maximising the felicitous/ innocuous feelings (the ‘congenial’ feelings)” then here is an example of what that untrammelled conviviality could look like when translated into action. (Richard, List D, Martin, 6 Mar 2016).
JesusCarlos: And I recognize that this is something my psyche resists, as I face an old pattern that consists on the one hand of activating fear in the face of the possibility of rejection (this is where I have made the most progress, this fear is 99% eradicated) and on the other hand of activating boredom or disinterest to encourage a change of direction. In short, a cowardly escape plan to avoid committing 100%. What has happened in these months has been a slow progress in becoming aware of the resistances (often stagnant for several days) and thus, thanks to investigation (always trying to do it while feeling good), I have been able to deactivate them, gradually advancing toward that experience of ever-more fulfilling intimacy.
It great to hear you have greatly overcome the fear of rejection – naiveté, i.e. liking yourself and therefore liking others, is the best antidote for that. As for the occurrences of “resistances” along the way, this is only natural because intimacy is about having less and less to hide. And all ‘I’ ultimately want to hide is ‘me’, all ‘I’ want to avoid and distract from, is being exposed. Yet the wonderful, naïve, playful and fun experiences of an “ever-more fulfilling intimacy” when ‘I’ dare to be exposed provides the encouragement to dare a little more each time. You could call it catching two ‘carrots’ in one – the intimacy you long for and the vital interest in loss of ‘self’ – and with pure intent operating they are one and the same: the less dominant the ‘self’ the greater the intimacy.
JesusCarlos: In short, the carrot that’s getting me to lower my defenses, release my controls, and activate my naiveté is the commitment to getting as close and intimate as possible to my partner. An important aspect I’ve been working on lately is eliminating all emotional dependence on her. Becoming immune, so to speak, to her emotional ups and downs. But with care that this doesn’t translate into a lack of empathy or emotional repression. The only way I detect to achieve this and avoid detours down other paths is to maintain a fine emotional attention (HAIETMOBA) moment by moment, trying to channel my varying states toward a sweet, peaceful, harmless, calm, joyful, and, last but not least, fun state. Because if this becomes serious, my old cowardly pattern of flight and seeking new distractions is reactivated.
You probably noticed that the way to become more immune to “emotional ups and downs” – both yours and hers – is to be paying particular attention to the seductive lure of affectuous intimacy –
[Richard]: What did not get included in those second and third paragraphs, regarding feeling-being ‘Grace’ and her rigorous gradations, was ‘her’ oft-repeated observation – regarding the onset of the third stage, on that range of naïveness, where ‘her’ gradation of ‘great’ related to sweetness – about a bifurcation manifesting where the instinctual tendency/ temptation was to veer off in the direction of love and its affectuous intimacy (due to a self-centric attractiveness towards feeling affectionate) as contrasted to a conscious choice being required so as to somehow have that sweetness then segue into a naïve intimacy via what ‘she’ described as ‘richness’ and graded as ‘excellent’. (Richard, Abditorium, Intimacy, #Intimacyscale)
Just for fun, regarding your “because if this becomes serious …” here is a list of tools Richard employed to get ‘himself’ out of spiritual enlightenment, a far more serious predicament that nobody ever will need to get into –
Richard: Just so that there is no misunderstanding: what really worked, when the identity was that ‘Altered State Of Being’, was
(1) a continuation of the totally dedicated and/or devoted pure intent to evince what the PCE’s evidenced … and
(2) a furtherance of the irreversible momentum, or inevitability, already set in place on day one as the process is, essentially, that of escaping from one’s fate and attaining to one’s destiny … and
(3) a prolongation of the attentiveness as to how the only moment of being alive was experienced … and
(4) an utter lack of dignity in being so far up oneself (narcissistic) as to render the term ‘egotistical’ a mere bagatelle in comparison … and
(5) a sense of humour which, if nothing else, made possible
(6) a delightful resurgence of the earlier felicity/ innocuity which again brought about, in combination with sensuousness, an outstandingly ingenuous sense of amazement, marvel and wonder.
And it was that last-named – the wide-eyed wonder of naiveté – which resulted in apperceptiveness (unmediated perception). (Richard, AF List, No. 60f, 29 Sep 2005).
JesusCarlos: I detect a second carrot: given the current global situation, the ongoing wars, the growing violence in Mexico, the possibility of the creation of military artificial intelligences that threaten our lives, and the growing awareness of the thousands of atrocities we humans have inflicted on one another, there is a growing urgency within me, a pressing need to do something radically significant as soon as possible that will contribute to true peace on earth. And I try to channel this kind of emotional pressure toward the only solution I currently detect as effective. (link)
Isn’t it wonderful that when you dare to care to be naïvely open and intimate with one fellow human being (your partner) you can’t help but be also more caring about the plight of others and “the global situation”. As you said in your second paragraph – “knowing that if I achieve it there [with my partner], I can achieve it with any other human being.”
Cheers Vineeto