I coined it myself but on the AFT site it’s referred to via how love is ‘palliative’ (aka in response to negative emotions aka covering negative emotions aka 2-layers).
So the negative is still there, the love comes on top to protect ‘me’ (basically on the animal level this is to keep me from laying down and dying of depression).
What I was able to observe directly was that the negative was always there, sometimes growing sometimes weakening. And then the loving feelings would come in and warp my vision to an even greater degree. That’s the double-layer; the negative is still lurking under the positive. For me specifically, the loving-fantasy is usually very visual, to the point where it is as if a movie screen has dropped in front of my vision, I can literally no longer see the actual. My awareness is not on the actual information coming in my senses, or actual thoughts/memories. It is on the loving fantasy.
–
Richard defines altruism as a one-time event, the full self-sacrificing moment of ‘complete altruism.’
In the normal world this is illustrated by someone heroically sacrificing their own lives to save someone else, in a drowning incident just for example.
In actualism terms, it is ‘me’ heroically sacrificing/self-immolating for the good of all humanity. That can only happen once.
It is something that ‘I’ do, though the action does in the end consist of ‘me’ “allowing it to happen” (as in, allowing the universe to bestow freedom upon me). The altruistic moment is the stepping out of the way and allowing.
The smaller altruisms could perhaps be related to caring.
Caring is interesting because for most people, caring is usually like “they want ‘x,’ so I will give them ‘x.’” It’s very simple.
With some context, it’s clear that such caring creates codependencies. That’s an interesting scenario, because once that is visible it means that ‘always giving them ‘x’’ is NOT caring. Because we know that it results in more suffering for them and for everyone.
In the end, the caring that moves the needle the most is for me to become happy/harmless/free. In whatever specific situation, but also in the big way as in self-immolating once and for all.
That context means, it’s no longer about ‘giving them x all the time,’ which I don’t want to do anyway. Which takes care of:
The most important work is: becoming free. Of course it would be silly to stop, ‘becoming free’ because someone else wants their petty thing. That is in the larger context hurting them.
That’s the type of altruism/caring that I’m working to connect myself more directly to.