Kuba: Thank you for your reply and it is very nice to hear from you ,
Hi Kuba,
You are welcome. I had taken a pause replying to your posts when you signalled that you wanted to “see where I am at without any of this information, without the map, without the recipe”. (link, 29 July 2025)
Kuba: I’m amazed how you are able to get right to the crux of what is going on for me. I guess that is an example of the actual intimacy which is being discussed, I remember how Srinath wrote (shortly after becoming actually free) about an exquisite attunement to others. And it seems that you are able to see me in a clearer light than I can see myself.
Have you noticed that often other people can detect your blind spots more easily than yourself and vice versa? Of course, it goes without saying that the perspective of an actual freedom (apperception) reveals the human condition in operation much more clearly than feeling beings can see it – ‘Vineeto’ experienced this often enough when talking to Richard and, even though ‘she’ wanted his expertise, was often also apprehensive about what might come to light.
Kuba: In the text below you highlighted this particular – “observing the social protocols” :
Richard: On the contrary, what is promoted and/or promulgated on the web site is enjoying and appreciating being alive/ being here each moment again – that is, despite the normal vicissitudes of life – by establishing a general feeling of well-being (a.k.a. ‘feeling good’), as a bottom line of experiencing and, thereby, all the while agreeably complying with the legal laws and observing the social protocols [emphasis and italics in original]. (Richard, Selected Correspondence, Hedonism).
Kuba: I am not sure why you highlighted this bit in particular but it is actually very relevant to me and how it relates to something which could be classed as an acutely empathic caring. I certainly would not describe myself as naturally empathic, actually my natural disposition would be something like intellectual-distanced.
If you had read the quote carefully to the end you would have noticed the addition “[emphasis and underlining in original]” before the link source, which means the highlighting was not of my doing but Richard drawing attention to his then-correspondent (List D, No. 04) who had his own objections to “observing the social protocols”. It is a fortunate coincidence that this issue rings a bell with you.
Kuba: In fact I would say that there is still something like a distaste for those social protocols as well as the general ways in which feeling beings operate. Of course this is where the dissociation comes in because I am a feeling being. Experiencing myself as if on the outside and “looking at all those feeling beings / social identities” with distaste can only be dissociation. (…)
Mmh, could what you call “something like a distaste” be resentment perhaps? And could the “experiencing myself as if on the outside” with “distaste” in regards to “observing the social protocols” be a feeling of superiority (or elitism) that those “social protocols” are only for the plebs but not for me, perchance? If this is the case the dissociation can be easily addressed looking at the elitism, don’t you think?
Kuba: And so I am not sure if I yet see the full extent of what you are pointing to however I can see that this distaste as well as the distancing/ dissociation is preventing all of me from being on board and thus allowing a near actual caring to make visible this “door as wide as the universe”.
I find it interesting that you didn’t mention (or didn’t notice) the other steps I described but jumped straight to “near-actual-caring” (on the map). Ha, it reminds me of a kid jumping up and down on a rickety chair to reach the top shelf with the cookie jar.
Kuba: Of course, if I genuinely like my fellow human beings then this would automatically take into consideration the fact that there is only 1 way into the world. Which means that those fellow human beings are programmed with the instinctual passions and furthermore they are programmed with a social identity (the social protocols etc) which is there to keep those passions in check. But of course something is not quite there, because why the distaste and the distancing.
Perhaps a more practical – rather than hypothetical or ratiocinative (link) – approach, would be to start being friends with yourself? I say this because you had said –
Kuba: I have always struggled to care of other identities, after-all I know how rotten ‘I’ am and how rotten ‘we’ are, how could I have this deep and abiding caring for such entities? [Emphasis added]. (link)
As long as you don’t like yourself, how can you genuinely like another fellow human being, let alone be considerate and genuinely (=naïvely) caring. They are just “such entities” like mannikins in a video-game.
Kuba: Perhaps it is correct to say that I am slightly different in the sense of never having been able to emotionally bond like others do – it seems this distaste and the distancing is related to this. In fact I can very clearly experientially sense out this distance, it is exactly that – this cold and detached space which exists in the psyche and it is placed between me and others.
As bonding is not a necessity, rather a hindrance, of genuinely caring, there is no need to be concerned. Distancing yourself originates in the (natural) misunderstanding that the choice is only between emotional bonding and distancing yourself. When you allow yourself being naïve and naïvely liking yourself and others you can experientially find out that there is another choice, as was your intention when you wrote on 29 July 2025 “see where I am at without any of this information, without the map, without the recipe”.
Kuba: So yes I think plenty of hints here, this cold and detached space it has to disappear so that all of me can be on board. And of course I can see the immediate benefit also, of being able to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate living amongst others. (link)
Not “has to disappear” – who likes obeying commands, even when they are your own 
. Be nice to yourself.
Kuba: It is like I resent feeling beings and social identities for being feeling beings and social identities. Whilst I am a feeling being with a social identity. But it’s like I don’t want to admit it, this distance it allows me to believe that I am apparently different. And perhaps I am different in that I cannot bond like others do but this is more a difference in degree and not in kind, because I am still a passionate entity.
And I observed this as various people were delivering their speeches at mine and Sonya’s second wedding yesterday. I have always been afraid of a situation like this, because I know that in such a public speaking situation I would show emotion, some kind of fear, getting choked up etc.
The ultimate fear for me would be that I would be seen to have emotions – this speaks volumes about this detached persona. My biggest fear would be for others to see that I am an emotional entity just like they are! (link)
How on earth can you notice and investigate feelings and channel the affective energy towards felicity and innocuity when you don’t even allow admitting your feelings (so that nobody else will notice). No wonder you can only brush all this aside with “I am rotten, we all are rotten and I don’t like neither myself nor them”.
Did you know that the actualism method is to affectively enjoy and appreciate – it’s always easy when you come back to the basics.
Cheers Vineeto