Kuba: Hi Vineeto,
Vineeto: You described living with/in naiveté in such a delightful way, and are even anticipating the prospect of having “only 1 direction left to travel” with no negative side effects in sight… (link)
Kuba: Yes this glimpse of what it would be like to only have 1 direction left to travel it happened yesterday and it reminded me of a writing from Richard where he compared a PCE to an experience where one travels deeper and deeper into a rainforest, until one comes across this “hushed stillness”. So this is how I saw it, as if I would walk deeper and deeper into that wonderland until the way back to ‘reality’ is lost and there ‘I’ would loose ‘myself’ too. It was very very wonderful and I realise this is what I deeply desire. (…)
Hi Kuba,
Is this the one you are referring to?
Richard: Sometimes a PCE is also known as ‘a nature experience’ … wherein one’s own personal experiencing is likewise the only proof worthy of the name. Being deep in a rain-forest goes some way towards making it all clearer … or any wilderness, for that matter. As one travels deeper and deeper into this – initially ‘other’ – world of natural delight, one experiences an intensely hushed stillness that is vast and immense … yet so simply here. I am not referring to a feeling of awe or reverence or great beauty – to have any emotion or passion at all is to miss the actuality of this moment – nor am I referring to any blissful or euphoric state of ‘being’. It is a sensate experience, not an affective state. I am talking about the factual and simple actualness of earthy existence being experienced whilst ambling along or sitting quietly without any particular thought in mind … yet not being mindless either. And then, when a sparkling intimacy occurs, do not the woods take on a fairy-tale-like quality? Is one not in a paradisiacal environment that envelops yet leaves one free? This is the ambience that I speak of. At this magical moment there is no ‘I’ in the head or ‘me’ in the heart … there is this apperceptive awareness wherein thought can operate freely without the encumbrance of any feelings whatsoever.
It is not my ambience nor yours … yet it is here for everyone and anyone for the asking … for the daring to be here as this body only. One does this by stepping out of the real world into this actual world, as this flesh and blood body, leaving your ‘self’ behind where ‘you’ belong … because the reality of the real world is an illusion ‘I’ create by ‘my’ very ‘presence’.
This ambience delivers the goods so longed for through aeons. (Richard, List C, No. 4b, #natureexperience).
Kuba: Then I considered whether it is the fear of ‘my’ death, I do notice that often what pushes me out of naive enjoyment and appreciation is something to the effect of what Richard called – grasping at redemptive straws – but I am not sure about that one either. (link)
Mmh, Richard talks about a “redemptive straw” or “one of several doomsday straws” in combination of a deep foreboding –
Richard: I have written about what can happen, regarding that fear so vast as to best be called dread, some years ago. Viz.:
• [Richard]: A deep feeling of dread, the abject intuition of impending doom, is fraught with foreboding, be it a grim, dire, or awful presage (link), and this intensely apprehensive trepidation is symptomatic of the existential angst (the anguish of the essential insecurity of being a contingent ‘being’) which underpins all suffering.
As such an occasion of profound dread is an opportune moment to plumb the depths of ‘being’ itself (‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being) rather than avoidance through realisation of the portentous event as all manner of phantasmagoria can be manifested by such evasion.
With pure intent one can enable a movement into the existential angst, rather than despairingly grasping at doomsday straws, which movement facilitates the bright light of awareness being shone into the innermost recesses of ‘my’ presence … which is ‘presence’ itself.
Such an active perspicacity in ‘my’ moment of reckoning will reveal that ‘presence’ itself feeds off ‘my’ fear – it is its very life-blood as it were – and this functional acuity brings an abrupt end to its nourishment.
Whereupon all-of-a-sudden one finds oneself on the other side of the wall (to keep with the ‘cornered’ analogy for now) with the hitherto unseeable doorway to freedom closing behind one and one is walking freely in this actual world where one has already always been living anyway.
All what happened was that upon ‘my’ exposure dissolution occurred and the Land of Lament sank without a trace. (Richard, List B, James3, 21 Nov 2002).
In short: what happened was that the existential angst of discovering how one is nothing but a contingent ‘being’, and how one will cease to ‘be’ unless one of several doomsday straws be grasped, resulted in the redemptive straw being grasped so firmly as to bring about an ASC (which waxed and waned in intensity) which endured for more than just a few weeks.
(Hence her abrupt about-face, as made into public knowledge in both ‘Richard’s Journal’ and on The Actual Freedom Trust website, and her out-of-character blackguarding of actualism and bad-mouthing of me). (Richard, List D, No. 6, 16 Nov 2009).
I don’t know if this applies.
Kuba: Initially it almost seemed like a “naughty thing” to be doing, to proceed into the wonderland whilst everyone else is ‘back there’ – but I don’t think this is the reason. (link)
Kuba: Hmm actually I wonder if it is this one, I am still worried about what those other identities will make of where I am proceeding. Like I can just hear those identities chattering “what a fool” all the while I am lost in the wonderland.
But at the same time I do remember what I discovered recently, that those identities are not the target of all this, it is the flesh and blood bodies that all this is for.
It seems perhaps ‘I’ am yet to abandon ‘humanity’, to not only be an utter fool in their eyes but also a complete deserter, and to proceed anyway. Because once ‘I’ am lost in that wonderland, with no way back to ‘reality” then ‘I’ am completely and utterly on ‘my’ own.
It sounds like a wonderful way to ‘get lost’.
Kuba: This being on my own I am not afraid of because in that wonderland there is the perfection and purity with me all the way. It is more that by virtue of even daring to enter the wonderland I am going against the whole thrust of ‘humanity’, every step taken transgresses some rule in ‘reality’. How could I speak to another when we are as if speaking from different worlds?
I realise this is what you are doing right now as you converse with us Vineeto. (link)
Ha … it is very easy to “speak to another”. They don’t know I am in a different world, I am entirely anonymous. Automorphism fills in the gaps. For instance, I am almost daily having coffee and chatting with a lively and mostly cheerful lady about my age who lives a few boats further up the wharf. We talk about life on the river, how lucky we are to live here in this paradise, comparing what we had for lunch/ dinner and what goes on in the world. She has no idea that I am different in that I only meet her as a flesh-and-blood body. She just says she enjoys the calming effect our chats have for her.
It’s only on this forum, set up to discuss actualism and an actual freedom, that I talk about my favourite topic.
So, in actuality it is quite different to your imagination.
Cheers Vineeto