Kuba: Thank you Vineeto, I sincerely appreciate your reply and I have been giggling to myself in slight embarrassment this morning. Of course it is not that you embarrassed me but it is the facts that did, seeing what I have been doing did it haha.
Hi Kuba,
It’s a delight to read about your reaction of amusement at your own tricks. There is so much which is amusing about the human condition when seen from a wider angle.
Rather than feeling embarrassed you can pat yourself on the back for having discarded this latest ‘problem’ so quickly. The feeling of embarrassment, when stripped of its socially inherent judgement of wrong or bad, can easily segue into feeling naïve (unsophisticated, ingenuous), which is where you can like yourself and others and don’t mind at all seen to be a fool in the eyes of others. “To be naïveté itself (i.e., naïveté embodied as ‘me’), which is to be the closest one can to innocence whilst remaining a ‘self’”. (A Rather Quaint Clay-Pit Tale). Make sure you all access the tool-tips as well.
Vineeto: Are you perhaps getting a bit desperate to invent a problem for the pleasure of solving it?
Kuba: Yes this is a good way to put it and in itself this shows where my priorities have been. To be content busying myself with “finding problems for the pleasure of solving them” whilst ‘I’ remain rotten.
I see what I have been doing now, there was this slight distance/dissociation between ‘me’ and ‘the problem’. ‘I’ can remain in existence by finding the next problem, always just slightly distanced from ‘me’, the more fancy the problem the longer ‘I’ can look for a solution and kid ‘myself’ that something productive is being done.
Ha, the identity is very apt in finding problems – it’s the very raison d’être at this point of keeping ‘you’ in existence. What you can do, remembering your priorities, is to diminish the power of believing until you eventually lose the ability to believe altogether.
Kuba: Whereas the below would be actually doing something :
Vineeto: You can “be original and […] authentic” and still be “‘doing good for others’” and “‘seeking excellence to uplift others’” – in fact much, much more efficiently – by genuinely caring, not for your own validation but for everyone’s actual benefit. Caring so much that you dare to show the way, not only to set everyone free from your own insalubrious identity (every identity is insalubrious) but also lead by example how easy it is to walk out of the human condition and to leave ‘yourself’ behind. And when you are without ‘self’ no one is below you and no one is above you either.
Now wouldn’t that be a genuine and thoroughly beneficent archetype, hey?
The funny (but perverse) thing is that I have been doing the opposite! I have been trying to prove how damn difficult it is, thus not only blocking myself but others into the bargain. Indeed those priorities are all over the place.
Yep, the easier becoming free looks when you come to your senses the more ‘you’ have to work hard to prove the opposite. Though it’s easy to correct course at any time you notice.
Kuba: I remember a correspondence on the AFT (which I cannot find now) where the correspondent mentions that Richard appears to be truly an exceptional person. Richard responds by saying that if the correspondent is being sincere in his observation then good, because they must dare to be an exceptional person themselves.
Time to raise the bar!
I couldn’t find that quote either with the word “exceptional” but I found this, which might be what you had in mind –
RESPONDENT: You sound like a remarkable man and I would like to ask a question. […]
RICHARD: Where you say ‘you sound like a remarkable man’ , if you mean it sincerely I would like to congratulate you for your perspicacity, because I must emphasise that it is vital that you aspire to being a remarkable person yourself … or else you will not succeed in ridding yourself of your sense of identity. This is very important, because people can put themselves down only too easily as being not good enough, not intelligent enough or not capable enough. I am not gifted or special … I was born of ordinary parents, was sent to an ordinary state school – receiving an average education until I was fifteen years of age – took an ordinary job and worked for a living. I eventually got married and had four children and bought a house and … in short, I was relatively normal and did all the expected things. Thus did I live my life for thirty two years according to the ‘tried and true’ methods as laid down by the countless millions of other humans that had lived before me. I tried my best to make their system work to produce the optimum result … but to no avail. Only then did I make the first and most important movement of my own volition … I discarded the ‘tried and true’ as being the ‘tried and failed’. (I did say ‘I was relatively normal’ because one thing, and one thing alone, stood out that distinguished me from whomsoever else I met: I wanted to know – as an actuality – just what it was to be a human being here on this planet, as this body, in this life-time.) [emphasis added]. (List A, No. 26)
Enjoy
Cheers Vineeto