Thank you for your replies Vineeto, I will digest them properly first but I wanted to note the below too :
I remember reading Richard’s word’s that the instinctual passions are not actual, for example there is no fear in a flower or a rock, only sentient creatures can experience fear as it is an affective phenomenon.
I always found it difficult to understand this properly, it made sense (somewhat) intellectually, and yet the instinctual passions they felt to be so overwhelming, so real, and not just for ‘me’ but for the rest of ‘humanity’ that surely they must be some genuine entity in their own right, that they had some intrinsic viability to borrow Richards words.
So the passions they would be experienced as ‘out there’ and solidly existing, part of the ‘natural order’ of things. Of course this is clearly how ‘humanity’ experiences them too, hence the beliefs in the forces of good and evil.
So from that viewpoint to proceed towards actual freedom, it would seem as if some abhorration of nature, that it would be fundamentally ‘wrong’. That one would be erasing something genuine.
Basically it was that ‘I’ believed the instinctual passions to be primary and pre-eminent, a fundamental aspect of the way the universe is.
I realise how all this sounds… It’s fun to write out the belief when it is already starting to fade, it doesn’t really make any sense! ![]()
But fear, aggression, nurture and desire, these are not genuine things. It is the perfection and purity of infinitude which is pre-eminent, the passions are an affective creation.
This is very fun because I remember when I first got stuck into investigating the various aspects of the ‘human constitution’ I was very excited, I could see that of course ‘humanity’ is mistaken about so many things and one by one those truths were exposed.
But there was a deeper level of truth, the one bestowed by blind nature, the software programming of fear, aggression, nurture and desire and the feeling being formed thereof. The truth held by this programming seemed inviolable - I remember what you said about the chicken feed.
But this programming, whatever apparent truth it holds it is based in deception. Of course I could very quickly see that various beliefs, values, theories etc were not facts, but it is actually no different with the instinctual programming, the instinctual passions are no more factual than the various beliefs held by ‘humanity’ - it is just deception all the way through lol.
I remember during a zoom call with Geoffrey someone mentioned about one type of fear/worry being more justifiable/sensible than another and Geoffrey quickly pointed out that no fear is sensible ![]()