‘Peter’: At some stage on the path to Virtual Freedom there is a feeling of being torn apart – a desperate holding on to the past and an unwillingness to commit oneself fully to letting go of the safe and familiar. It is as though one is trying to be part of two worlds or as though one is two identities – ‘who’ you have been taught to be and ‘who’ you are becoming – a committed Actualist. I say ‘who’ deliberately, for this is not the prelude to self-immolation, but the last of the substantial doubts that one has. It seems as though everybody has one particular issue that keeps them holding on – one issue of their social identity that they desperately hold on to and stubbornly refuse to relinquish
It looks like I have finally found ‘the thing’, after experiencing naivete yesterday I began looking squarely at what was getting in the way of it. It seems so silly writing this out and yet this has been the main thread in all of my objections. It is that I have been unable to contemplate proceeding where the approval/disapproval of others is no longer the primary reference for my life. Of course where pure intent beckons this is of no ultimate concern but even proceeding towards naivete this is no longer of ultimate concern. I could see this resistance in me, that without the approval/dissaproval of others I simply had no frames of reference, it seemed that it would be an empty life, pointless life, simply because all that I have known thus far is operating under those reference points of how others see me. That mirror of how others see me has been all that I know and to abandon it seems like it would leave me with nothing. This in particular shocked me, just how deeply I rely on how others see me, that I could not even contemplate a life where this is not the primary concern in all that happens.