Kuba: Hi Vineeto,
Vineeto: Now that you have become aware of the insidiousness of ‘good’ feelings you can have fun honing your skills to discover them sooner. ‘Vineeto’ found watching movies, especially those feel-good movies, an excellent training ground.
Kuba: Oh yes I have been having fun honing in on this, I am fascinated by the fact that those good feelings, they are right there in all of ‘my’ dramas and indeed ‘humanity’s’ dramas. What a gigantic step to see this, but seeing this has taken the legs out from under those dramas, both the good and the bad was needed to maintain them.
At times I had this passing thought – “What is going to be left without those good feelings” in the sense that something precious would be missing, but this is not so at all. Yesterday I had a glimpse of what exists outside of both the good and the bad, and it left me speechless – it is a world filled to the brim with magical anhedonic delight. I am experiencing the flavour of it as I type this message and there is certainly nothing missing haha!
Hi Kuba,
Indeed, the traditional wisdom is to cover up bad feelings and dullness with good feelings, and, of course, that never works on a permanent basis. The radical, in fact epoch-changing, aspect of Richard’s discovery is when ‘he’ examined the good, holy and highly revered feelings during his enlightenment period – first compassion and love, then the fantasy of the ‘Unborn and Undying’ spiritual dimension, i.e. immortality and with it the eternal hope for the survival of the soul, and finally pacifism, the bastion of both enlightenment and humanism.
Then it became eventually blindingly obvious that all of what we call the ‘Good’, determined by ‘good’ feelings, is as much originator and perpetuator of the ‘Bad’ as fear and aggression themselves. One simple example is to observe how many murders are committed justified by love/ jealousy/ possessiveness, and how wars made possible by aggression are coupled with desire for power/ safety and the fierce loyalty of the population. How can one consider loyalty, for example, as something beneficial when this perspective becomes clear!
Vineeto: It was only in his tenth year of enlightenment that Richard discovered the vital role the highly revered ‘good’ feelings played in keeping him from breaking through to an actual freedom –
Richard: … I had to turn my sights upon the last thing that stood between me and an actual freedom. I would have to let go of the deeply ingrained concept of ‘The Good’. For this to happen I would have to eliminate ‘The Bad’ in me, or else I would be likely to go off the rails and run amok. Little did I realise that it was ‘The Good’ that kept ‘The Bad’ in place. I was soon to find this out. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, SC, Enlightenment Resumé, #ahimsa).
In all fairness to Richard’s apparently long process of discovery – first, there was no precedent in human history and second there was this ensnarement of enlightenment aggrandising all the ‘good’ feelings and as such the ‘Self’ – hence the long journey of dismantling all of the good feelings. As he said a few times –
Richard: I thus found out via personal experience where I had been going wrong for eleven years … self-aggrandisement – as in ‘I AM love’ – is so seductive. (Richard, List B, No. 4a, #pacifist)
Kuba: Yes, this is fascinating – For me too the “last frontier” was ‘the good’, for it had kept the ‘the bad’ in place. I can understand what you mean now when you write :
Vineeto: one at first only transfers ‘the saviour’, or ‘the method’ from one person/ objective to another until one finally realizes that an actual freedom from the whole of the human condition is a different ballgame altogether.
Kuba: And the other thing, the proof of the pudding is that I am now consistently having a great time, for example I noticed a minute ago as I put down the phone to a customer that yet again it was a benign dealing, it’s all quite easy when ‘I’ am not mucking things up. (link)
This is wonderful to read – gone are the days of “the morning resentments and evening gloom” (28 Oct 2025) – making way for consistently, and I presume unconditionally, enjoying being alive. That is indeed the proof for having succeeded in getting to the root of the problem.
Just out of curiosity, do you recall which particular discovery, i.e. which of the ‘good’ feelings you investigated, happened to be the turning point to allow you live in this world “filled to the brim with magical anhedonic delight” ?
Such a wonderous adventure.
Cheers Vineeto