Journal de Henry

Journals
622

Richard:

"Why then the desire for ‘acceptance, love, belonging’ (and thus the collapsing defence mechanisms)?

There is more to it than the hereditarily programmed gregarian urge, of course, as the basic instinctual passions in general, such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire, automatically form themselves into a feeling ‘being’ … which is who ‘I’ am at root (‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being is ‘being’ itself). And any ‘me’ (a genetically encoded passionate inchoate ‘presence’ or rudimentary survival ‘self’ as it were) is an alien identity forever locked-out of paradise (the source of sorrow, by the way, but that is another story) desiring validation from all the other alien identities.

Put simply: ‘acceptance, love, belonging’ verifies, endorses, and consolidates ‘me’ … and not only am ‘I’ thus authenticated, sanctioned, and substantiated but ‘my’ presence has meaning as well."

And:

"…sorrow is not the result of malice … it is because ‘you’ are – by ‘your’ very nature – forever cut-off from the magnificence of being here now at this moment in eternal time and this place in infinite space. That is, ‘you’ cannot know the purity of the perfection of the infinitude of this very material universe. This is called, in the jargon, separation. Because of this separation, ‘you’ desire union … oneness, wholeness and so on. In a word: love.

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Except when being naïve, no?

Then “you” can know perfection as a feeling being. “You” don’t have to be painfully separate from it. It isn’t written in stone. In fact, “you” can be intimately connected to it (such connection is even AFT approved!). For the perfection of infinitude knows no bounds. It is here – right here, touching you at your innermost place of “being” – as much as it is there. Is it not?

“Naive intimacy” is to be intimate with the flawless perfection of infinitude as a feeling being. Maybe if we’re intimate enough with it (or if it’s intimate enough with us!), we’ll dissolve completely into it, leaving only perfection, instead of “me” and perfection.

Richard (2002): To explain: one can bring about a benediction from the perfection and purity, which is the essential character of the universe, by contacting and cultivating one’s original state of naiveté through the application of sincerity. . . . This blessing allows a connection to be made between oneself [i.e., “me”] and the perfection and purity.
Mailing List 'AF' Respondent No. 18

Richard (1998): Naiveté is so vital to freedom. This is because even the strictest application of moralistic and ethicalistic injunctions will never lead to the clean clarity of the purity of living the perfection of the infinitude of this material universe.
Mailing List 'B' Respondent No. 8

Richard (1999): Perfection is an actual condition – intrinsic to this universe – that a human being [read: “feeling being”] can tap into by pure intent.
Mailing List 'AF' Respondent Alan

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Connection in terms of a golden thread - but that still falls far short of being it.

To use the example of the labyrinth, it’s far better to have a connection to a golden thread leading out than it does to not -

But that still falls far, far short of actually being outside of the labyrinth!

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Yes, “you” are not being perfection itself. But to be intimately connected with the flawless perfection of infinitude as a feeling-being is surely a blessing (just as Richard says!). Something to be celebrated and appreciated, surely.

In other words, to be naïve is to not be so “cut-off” from perfection as that first quote would suggest. Quite the contrary: it’s to be “intimate” with it.

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Sure, but it’s still not the same as being there.

Every PCE I’ve ever had I’ve been struck by surprise. Even after having dozens of them. It is impossible to accurately remember them, all I can do is look for a tenuous awareness of the flavor in my experiencing. There is a quantum-leap that occurs between ‘me’ and ‘not-me.’

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Attracted to death

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Because this universe is “characteristically propelled to the best it can grow into,” and it is always now, I can sit back, relax, and enjoy the unfolding of everything as it happens now.

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1 | 31 | 23

I’ve just been engaging with an investigation of shame, and came across this conceptualization online:

Shame anxiety : “the fear of disgrace…is the anxiety about the danger that we might be looked at with contempt for having dishonored ourselves” “I am afraid that exposure is imminent and hence terrible humiliation”.

It’s funny because, ‘I’ am a fraud. To expose ‘me’ is to reveal that I am in fact not genuine at all. So we all carry this shame as a part of existing, and then try to cover it up with various occlusions or with identities of pride.

I don’t even exist, and I try to maintain all these tenuous facades to fool others into thinking I am ‘good.’

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“The limpid and lucid perfection and purity of being here now, as-I-am, is akin to the crystalline perfection and purity seen in a dew-drop hanging from the tip of a leaf in the early-morning sunshine; the sunrise strikes the transparent dew-drop with its warming rays, highlighting the flawless correctness of the tear-drop shape with its bellied form. One is left almost breathless with wonder at the immaculate simplicity so exemplified. … Is it not impossible to conceive – and just too difficult to imagine – that this is one’s essential character?”

Seems like an improvement over feeling shame at potentially being exposed as a fraud at any moment imo

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From the same site:

“I have been exposed and humiliated, I want to disappear as this being”

:joy: :joy:

Ok, bet

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“You” are everything that nature orchestrated you to be, are you not (shame included)? “You” are perfectly natural. Perfectly organic. Perfectly … genuine.

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Everything you feel is perfectly natural and therefore perfectly genuine. How can that which is natural not be genuine?

Richard (2002): The affective feelings are most certainly natural – as is the hot-blooded killing of one’s fellow human being – so much so that I make no secret of the fact that what I am reporting is indeed unnatural.
Mailing List 'B' Respondent No. 12

Richard (2004): It is natural, for example, to injure, maim, or kill one’s fellow human being in a fit of anger.
Mailing List 'AF' Respondent No. 64

If anything, the condition of actual freedom is unnatural. Of course it’s really not, actually. Nothing that occurs in nature is unnatural. It’s all natural. It’s all genuine.

Now, if you wish to be in agreement with Richard, then you must maintain that shame is unnatural (aka artifical) while “your” passions are natural (aka genuine).

Now, if “your” passions are natural, what does that make “you”?

[2001]
RESPONDENT: Many feelings as shame are triggered off by thought when remembering past lived experiences stored as memory and the thinker lives them anew, giving rise to the feeling of shame anew, so that the rising of the sensation of discomfort called ‘shame’ seems to be just a process dependent of the thinker and of memory. The instinctive bodily sensation named ‘shame’ seems to be a natural reaction when the thinker is making a situation of insecurity through his interpretations. In this way, it seems that thought as thinker is not the primordial creator of instinctive bodily sensations, but also there’s not the rising of the instinctive discomfort named as ‘shame’ without the action of the thinker.

RICHARD: Indeed it is so that ‘thought as thinker is not the primordial creator of instinctive bodily sensations’ if by ‘bodily sensations’ you mean bodily feelings (affective feelings) … and there is no ‘natural reaction’ called ‘shame’. Shame, and all its variations (such as embarrassment, humiliation, mortification, disgrace, dishonour, ignominy,) are cultivated feelings, socialised feelings, cultural feelings.

Speaking personally, I have no shame whatsoever (hence no pride nor its antidotal humility).

RESPONDENT: So that thought as thinker is not the primordial creator of bodily sensations but the thinker is what can trigger off them, what can create a response of fear or sorrow when it is indeed unnecessary.

RICHARD: It is emotional memory … a non-verbal memory located in what is popularly called the ‘lizard brain’ or ‘reptilian brain’ at the top of the brain-stem/ base of the skull.

RESPONDENT: This points me that the instinctive bodily responses and sensations can exists by themselves without a so called ‘feeler’ at their root, they are an essence of the body, they seem to be natural and it is not necessary to extinct them, it seems only necessary to extinct the thinker, who makes false interpretations of reality and creates unnecessary situations of insecurity and threat, triggering off then these prior existing bodily responses and sensations. Do you consider the above correct? If not, why?

RICHARD: No, because they not only ‘seem to be natural’ … they are indeed natural. It is natural to feel fear and aggression and nature and desire … these feelings are blind nature’s instinctual survival passions. However, now that a thinking, reflective brain has developed sensible thought, thoughts and thinking these instinctual survival passions can be safely eliminated.

In fact, what was once essential for survival is nowadays the biggest threat to survival.
Mailing List 'B' Respondent No. 45

The positions to consider from the above quote are the following:

  • Shame is not natural.
  • Fear and aggression and nurture and desire are natural.

One item is regarded as a product of human cultivation, the other is regarded as innate and “bodily.”

Polystyrene cups are also a product of human cultivation. Does that likewise make them unnatural?

Is that which is artificial (“man-made”) truly unnatural? Is that which is unnatural truly not genuine (aka a fraud, a fake)?

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@rick The fact that ‘I’ am not genuine is not to do with whether ‘I’ am natural or not but with whether ‘I’ am actual or not. The apparent dilemma in your post is only possible because you do not make this distinction.
As an identity ‘I’ am not genuine because ‘I’ am not a fact.

634

So something indisputably natural, something unquestionably bodily, is not genuine?

So something indisputably natural, something unquestionably bodily, is fraudulent?

Nature commits fraud?

Nature makes fake things?

Natural but artificial?

(Not disputing whether or not it’s actual. Just pointing out the incongruity of seeing something as both natural and fake at the same time.)

635

Hmm maybe nature does dabble with deception and fakery after all :smile:

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Indeed, what Claudiu said about pure intent allowing ‘me’ to safely be ‘me’ in all my rotten to the core being, is crucial.

The universe is a seamless whole. The division between the ‘real’ and actual is a convenient distinction for describing the experience of doing away with a natural product of evolution.

It’s a convenient description because it describes the experience.

As Richard quite often points out, our ‘self’ is at heart a genetically inherited eventuality.

‘we’ certainly accumulate secondary emotions such as “shame” after birth. However, we are not the only creature to do so. Our “best friends” - dogs - are clearly capable of guilt and shame.

“Shame” is at odds with the experience of pure intent. The overarching benevolence that allows for the existence of everything. Seems weirdly contradictory, but there it is.

And no one knows why, or can explain it.

As Vineeto said to me “why not?” in reference to the sky being blue. Implying it is obviously that, and the “why” is more to do with our rejection of facts rather than us actually knowing a better alternative.

There was a famous debate in philosophy, with one side saying we live in the “best of all possible worlds” the other “the worst of all possible worlds”. Obviously then, it’s a choice of how we want to experience it.

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Yes, natural need not equate to desirable or optimal. It’s just the association between natural/bodily and fake/not genuine which struck me as incredibly incongruous.

But, like everything, it’s in how you look at it. Sure, nature’s plants and animals engage in fakery and deception for survival all the time. There are loads of cases of an organism trying to pass something off as “genuine” when in fact it’s totally “fake” in order gain some kind of advantage in the wild.

Then again, while a leaf-appearing butterfly may not be a genuine leaf, it’s still a genuine butterfly. A genuine something.

I was trying to make the point that nature does not make false things. But evidence suggests she has no qualms about being a deceptive bitch at times. But again, there still is always something genuine happening with the “deceptive” and “fake.” It’s a glass half empty, half full thing I reckon.

One more interesting instance of fraud in the natural world. We humans are in good company, no? :smile:

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Yet, this is the departure here. This is where shame comes in. Deception? Bitch?

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Being facetious. Should have added a silly emoji :yum:

Mother Nature engages in deception, yes, but only because she wants the best for her precious creatures. :slight_smile: No shame in that.

(Speaking metaphorically here, of course)

640

Well I can’t help but share this mother of all cow’s deception … a spider at it’s tail as a bait lol

641

Fascinating article. 25 years of psychotherapy behind it.

It would almost seem I have a vested interest in being ashamed.