Henry: Thank you for the detailed response!
You are very welcome.
Richard to Irene: The piquancy of one’s personal sorrow pales into insignificance when confronted with the pungency of all the sorrow of anyone who has ever lived or who is living now or who is yet to be born … for one is indulging oneself in self-justifying grief. There the beauty of this universal pathos reveals what lies eternally silent at the heart of the mystique … a god or a goddess that is The Truth. (Richard, AF List, Irene, 11 Oct 1998).
Henry: The aspect of the beauty of The Truth / God etc. is fascinating to feel out, I can see now how it has been such a temptation down the years… without the context of history it only makes sense that one would be intuitively drawn in that direction. It is indeed seductive at an intuitive level.
You can say that again! I spent 14 years at the feet of an enlightened master because of the attraction of his Love and Compassion. Even occasional outbursts of ‘Divine Anger’ did not penetrate sufficiently into my common sense to even question the nature of the Truth I was seeking. Only his death eventually freed me from the addictive influence of Divine Love and Compassion … and then on my further quest for ‘what is Truth’ I met Peter and Richard.
Henry: The direction of the actual is sweet but in a different way, it’s clean to the point of being nearly invisible from within the human condition. It’s amazing to consider how Richard managed to find his way to it.
Yet the more you experientially understand actualism and remember your own PCEs the more obvious its utter purity becomes.
Henry: The discerning intellect is so key, to be able to spot those inconsistencies and contradictions present within the August state, to be a keen observer of history and of ourselves. Within those contradictions and wilful ignorance is the dark side of the enlightened state:
Richard: … what I then called ‘The Absolute’ presented itself as being feminine – a Radiant Being initially seen to be Pure Love – which femininity I would nowadays consider to be a product of me being of masculine gender. Due to an intensity of purpose there was the capacity to penetrate into the nature of this ‘Radiant Being’ and I was able to see ‘Her’ other face:
It was Pure Evil – the Diabolical underpins the Divine … (Richard) 1
A “discerning intellect” is not enough to dissuade you from following your “intuition” and your feelings. Common sense helps but it is the sincere yearning for peace on earth, which allows you to fully engage and understand that all of the intuitively attractive solutions offered by humanity have done zilch, for centuries of experimenting with human souls, to bring peace on earth even an inch closer to how it was in the early days of human history.
‘Vineeto’ asked Richard once, in ‘her’ early actualism years, if humans have made any progress in consciousness and his answer was – “no, no progress at all”. ‘Vineeto’ was deeply shocked. I now know that this is so.
Vineeto: I find it fascinating that you first had to deal with fear and aggression in order to see that people don’t like others to be happy and from there you could see that sympathy is not harmless.
Henry: I see it coming from two sides:
- Sympathy is not harmless because it conceals the greater peace that’s possible by offering a validating pacifier
- People can become aggressive when they don’t think someone is behaving properly. In the case of sympathy, the belief is that by withholding sympathy one is hurting the sufferer (the ‘victim’). The aggression is a counter-attack to a perceived attack.
There is an additional angle to No. 2. People who develop a condition to any degree outside of the sanity spectrum are often very sensitive to vibes and psychic currents and therefore instantly feel when they are lied to, or disliked. It is not a ‘belief’ as you call it but a direct affective experience. Hence their ‘victimhood’ is not merely imagined, but experienced and reinforced by everyday experience. It is, of course also part of their survival strategy and as such of vital importance.
You will find that they do appreciate honesty and integrity, more than your well-adapted co-workers might.
Richard: … when a ‘normal’ person becomes ‘psychotic’ it is because they have found the pressures of life too much to handle and have chosen for psychosis as their way out. As strange as it may sound to normal people, they are comfortable with their modus operandi and have no interest in budging one iota from their position … despite their pleas for help (a part of their strategy). (Sundry, Disclaimer).
Henry: This is selfish in nature because the belief in the victimhood of the other is felt… ‘I’ know they are suffering because ‘I’ feel their suffering. In this sense, the counter-attack is defending one’s own ‘self.’ The pang is personal, and the defensive aggression is personal.
Are you talking about yourself when you say “the belief in the victimhood of the other is felt”? And that you feel your “counter-attack is defending one’s [your] own ‘self’”? And that your “defensive aggression is personal”? And that is why you first had to deal with fear and aggression? I am trying to understand your own emotional process and insights.
Henry: Guilt is similar to this as well… one identifies with the ‘victim’ and feels the emotional harm one caused to them. Because of the belief in the solidity of that harm, it’s felt that a crime was committed. But it works similarly to sympathy in only continuing the entire structure, as has been pointed out many times on the AFT it does little or nothing to prevent future behavior.
Just one more case of the diabolical underpinning the divine.
When you feel “that a crime was committed” you swallow the set-up hook, line and sinker. Only ongoing affective attentiveness can break that vicious cycle. Your clients have nevertheless set up their lives the way they did (largely unconsciously of course) and in their scheme you are their servant.
Henry: I find it disturbing and distressing to discover that all the well-meaning people I grew up around and emulated carried that evil – and still carry it (as do I). Something to reflect on further.
It is not only the “well-meaning people” who “carried that evil”, even though it is shocking to discover this. It’s a self-perpetuating set-up of both sides of the game.
Only unilateral action can resolve the situation you find yourself in.
Cheers Vineeto