Kub933's Journal

[Kub933]

Work has been quiet today so I have spent a fair bit of time re-reading some of the older posts on here. I have found some of the posts by Srinath and Geoffrey to be especially stimulating, this one has been on my mind since - Actualism and the Weird - #45 by Srinath

@Srinath

It’s rare when I have those moments of glimpsing infinitude - or what I used to call shortly after AF ‘the beast!’ There were times when I felt that an an inhabitant of this planet, I was a tiny insect riding the back of a truly enormous creature whose very body was the earth, sky, stars and planets stretching into infinity. Then I remember a few times walking around outside when I experienced the earth as if it were the still living remains of an enormous god. It reminded me of aboriginal dreaming lore where mountains and forests are thought to be the bones and entrails of gods and ancestors and I could see how the actual experience of encountering the world can be translated affectively into mythic narratives and become literalised, spiritualised. Probably not necessary to say but as a disclaimer, I don’t actually think the universe is a giant turtle or that the world is the body of Zeus! Just trying to give you all some sense of the enormity and magic of these moments.

It has been so fascinating because I have been getting glimpses of this, of matter being not merely passive. It is interesting because as discussed in that thread, ‘I’ turn the physical world into something dead and mechanical and then project any enchantment into the spiritual realms.

But I started looking from the other angle, the angle of the PCE, where ‘I’ simply don’t exist, in fact in that world ‘I’ have never existed. Yet there is all this stuff happening, how could this universe ever be dead!

It is only because ‘I’ am the arbiter of existence and the physical is not ‘me’ as such it is seen as cold, dead, mechanical. Then this interesting flip happens when ‘I’ slip away and everything including this body is made of that same magical, effervescent stuff and there is only this stuff.
I was contemplating all this in the car at my lunch break and it seemed to be on a brink of a PCE, those experiences actually remind me of what Richard used to say “being on the verge of it happening/not happening”.
The other thing standing out was the sensuosity of the world around, including me, the colours and the shapes being so saturated that they are almost ridiculous, looking at the red jumper I am wearing today I couldn’t believe that the red could be so juicy. Then looking down at my hands I see that they are the very same scintillating, magical stuff.
At this point I realise/I am reminded that ‘I’ never existed in the first place.
I always struggled to accept what Richard describes, that as a flesh and blood body one is already pristine and perfect, that there is no differentiation between that Purity and this body.
The reason ‘I’ could never accept this is because ‘I’ know just how dirty ‘I’ am. What about the malice raging on inside ‘me’, what about the endless problems that ‘I’ cause, how could all this just be wiped clean like that, leaving nothing but purity and innocence.
Yet when that ‘flip’ happens everything is seen to be already perfect, including this body.
It is a very weird space I find myself in lately, it is like oscillating between a world where ‘I’ simply don’t exist/have never existed, where everything is already pristine, and then back into reality, although reality is getting very flimsy indeed! It’s becoming so easy to slip out of it.