So I was just washing the dishes and ‘I’ slipped away for a few seconds, how original hey! 
Lately it seems that I am not fully satisfied unless I am in that place, there is a certain release that comes with the complete absence of affect/being, it seems now it’s either that for keeps or it’s not good enough.
It’s been weird lately, I can see that whatever ‘progress’ I thought I had made towards actual freedom has been a fabrication. This whole idea of being an actualist and kind of moving towards something, ticking off boxes, getting closer etc. Fundamentally nothing has changed, as in I am still a self.
Investigation seems to have lost any interest to me, there is just nothing else I can go over that I haven’t already dug into over the years.
Feeling good via control is no longer so appealing either because I know that I will be forever at the risk of slipping back. It’s like being on a boat that’s slowly filling up with water and forever having to deal with the excess building up.
The existential option of remaining an identity in any form is just not that good.
Then there are these experiences I get where the entire world is transformed into a magical fairytale, those are the one fully satisfying now. I have been trying to follow that aspect, the magical fairytale quality, it’s one of a kind!
I have been thinking lately that I need to take the PCE off the pedestal, it must become something like a ‘of course, why not’, it shouldn’t be some kind of precious experience that’s granted as if by luck, perfection needs to be ordinary, for myself and for all.
Whatever we hope to be a “golden ticket” we inevitably glorify and reserve.
I really like what you say about making perfection “of course, why not?” Ordinary.
It seems slowly I am getting more and more of a flavour of what it means for life to live itself. Lately it seems I am approaching retirement as an identity
I have gone round and round trying to control life through different means and schemes and they all failed miserably.
I just have no other direction left to travel in, they are all dead ends, none of them are appealing any more.
But what a weird place to find myself in at the same time, because I cannot move in any direction anymore.
There was in the past a kind of despair at this, there is no longer that. There is just this option to chop off those last little bits of control remaining, and for the ride to unfold itself.
Something really damn cool is infiltrating into my experience lately. I have noticed the last couple of days that more and more there is an anhedonic flavour to my experience that pokes through. It is not any kind of dissociative / bland / neutral thing though, its flavour is something that is delightful every time (irregardless of what the particular experience entails) yet that delighting has no affective component (it is completely outside of that spectrum), it is a purely sensate delighting and it is so tasty haha!
Ok so since this thread - How to feel delight - #13 by Pman things have been progressing, it looks like I was definitely walking down some dead end for a while.
Realising the utter simplicity of the method has been such a blessing, so many things make sense now. For the first time in a month or so I have been able to get into states of excellence, to a place where things begin to get so soft and sweet.
For a while I was exploring the world of current philosophy, psychology etc hoping to find some ‘missing piece’ of information that would propel me further. What I realised now is that truly no one has been able to deliver the goods, that it is all pointing in the wrong direction.
The missing piece was actually the realisation that it is up to me how I experience this moment of being alive and this is way too naive to be encompassed by any ideology.
I can very well see how Richard was able to jump right into an out from control virtual freedom. He simply saw what he wanted to live and went for it. Whereas what I was doing was looking for some outside force that would do it for me, it is so obvious now that actualism does not promise, it delivers right now.
It seems I have been trapped in some kind of deterministic approach, believing that if only I research long enough that some piece of the domino will fall and begin to change things. But again that is waiting for something on the outside to change me. The answer is actually way simpler and more direct and all I have to do is enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive.
Is it really that I had to spend over 3 years to see this? Because it’s mentioned countless times, and yet every time I heard this advice I would somehow twist it and think “oh well but they can’t be talking about me, it’s different here”, or “they must be being tricky by presenting it in this way, overly simplistic, I will go the clever way (my way)”
I remember a bit in the questions and answers from Australia that summarises this - that we over complicate things because we cannot accept that peace on earth is truly this simple. It seems that I will go every possible route as long as it does not entail me having to do something, meanwhile the option to simply walk down the wide and wondrous path is here all along, each moment again.
What I have been doing, which somehow never worked before, is putting things in a very straightforward way to myself - Right now do I want to continue doing X (worrying, scheming etc) and essentially wasting away this precious (and only) moment of being alive OR do I want to enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive. Then it’s just been a case of skilfully shifting the gears so that this works optimally.
What came very quickly was a realisation of just how precious this moment of being alive is, in the past I always saw this kind of thing as some desperate coping strategy, getting most out of life before death inevitably comes. But recently I saw it as a fact, that indeed this moment is precious beyond compare because it will never happen again. There is not a single thing that could ever be traded for it and more often than not I am busy wasting it away for X.
There is something very interesting when I continue heading in this precious direction, something that Richard mentions when he writes (paraphrasing) that enjoyment and appreciation easily engenders dedication to peace on earth. It’s like we are all here and it’s so wonderful, how could I possibly allow anything but the best for myself and others for it is all so precious.
So I can see that the commitment towards self immolation does not have to be generated all by myself, it’s this ultimately precious quality that really leaves no choice.
Oh and the other thing that clicked was the somewhat active component of enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive and how that is the same thing as the advice to redirect the affective energy towards the felicitous and innocuous so that it cannot be spent someplace else.
Previously my approach was more passive, as in I would remain passive and chip away at the good and bad feelings whilst waiting for the enjoyment and appreciation to come to me. But this affective energy is never ending, there is always the next distraction.
I’ve been kinda seeing it like having to keep a bunch of energetic kids out of getting in trouble. I can forever try to discipline them or I can give them something to do! Enjoyment and appreciation is this something for me to do, so that I am not otherwise causing mischief. For I can’t be doing 2 things at once, if I am busy enjoying and appreciating I am not busy being sorrowful and malicious.
Oh and the last one, I remember a while ago a discussion on the forum suggesting that it could be useful to present the method as about the movement into feeling good rather than feeling good itself. Or any other suggestions about shifting the method around so it’s more ‘user friendly’.
I can see now why that would be a mistake, to make the method into anything other than enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is to engage in putting things off, essentially the mistake I have been making this whole time.
The method is enjoying and appreciating because this is the 1 thing that delivers right now instead of promising, it is the 1 thing that cuts through all the techniques and ideologies which are essentially delaying tactics. Adding any step is to obscure the simplicity of what Richard has discovered, the thing that works.
In short - That atrophied enjoyment and appreciation muscle has to be trained directly, and often 
I saw something yesterday that is really quite bizarre/wonderfull. Recently I’ve had this noise cancelling ear plug split in two and 1 part is lodged deeply inside my ear canal, pressing against the ear drum. A & E failed to remove it and in fact pushed it deeper and I am having to wait until the 10th October to be seen by an ear specialist for a possible removal of the damned thing. So anyways there has been times I have been experiencing something akin to claustrophobia but more like this rising sense of panic to get the thing out now!
It’s really a no choice situation though so the only option I have is either to feel bad or to just go ahead and enjoy and appreciate anyways.
I was re-watching Geoffreys zoom video where he mentions about the future not actually existing, that there is only this moment, that if someone was to say to him “you will die in 5 years” that it means nothing. As I watched I briefly experienced this as a fact, that time is not actually moving AT ALL, that it is all still and only this moment is actual, which means we are not coming from anywhere and we are not going anywhere at all. Unlike in the real world where we are progressing along the line from past - present - future, none of this ‘movement’ is actually happening.
Then I was watching TV later and I started to experience this rising desperation for that future moment where the ear-plug might come out to come now. And so in my psyche there was the present moment (uncomfortable), the anticipated future moment (hope of good feeling) and this whole chasm of time that I had to ‘wait out’ to get ‘there’, there was this very real feeling that it will ‘take so long to come’.
Then that prior experience whilst watching the video came in and I saw again that time is not actually moving at all, that when the plug comes out it will be now, and it is already now, time will not have moved from A to B and so there was no time that had to be ‘waited out’. This entire sense of the ‘real world time span’ was momentarily seen as not actual. And how freeing that was, because I experientially understood that just as it does not mean anything for Geoffrey if someone says he will die in 5 years, it meant absolutely nothing if someone was to say to me ‘but you have to wait 5 days for this thing to come out’, for it is always this moment.
I think this is the best I can describe this seeing, I’ve been rememorating the flavour of it since, the stillness that is intrinsic to infinitude and the ramifications it has. Certainly there is no fear of death where time does not move, for there is nowhere else to go to!
I wonder if this was precipitated by the seeing described in my previous post but more has clicked with regards to time. Which is cool because the eternity of time always seemed trickier to grasp than the infinity of space.
So what came to my mind yesterday is Richard describing that when we measure the hours in the day, we are actually measuring the rotation of the earth on its axis relative to where the sun is.
It finally clicked for me that ‘time’ as we know in the real world, does not actually exist. That actual time is the eternal arena for things to change in and itself does not move, it is still. It is things which change within this arena, those are the ones that move, not time!
So humans took a measure, they arbitrarily sliced off a chunk from this eternity by tracking the relative movement of things, this was then made into a ‘thing-in-itself’ and projected out to become ‘real time’. The one always moving, bearing down on us, one that we are running out of etc.
Yet this ‘real time’ is nothing but a psychological/psychic creation. We are using some arbitrary measure to try to speak for the nature of eternity.
It seems so obvious now, all those characteristics which are ascribed to ‘real time’ simply have no bearing on what time actually is. And so I experience this entire construct somewhat disappearing, I don’t really ‘buy it’ anymore, for it does not align with the facts.
The reason I write ‘somewhat disappearing’ is because there seems to be a second, much more persistent component to this illusion of ‘real time’. And this component is to do with the nature of what ‘being’ is.
It is the mechanisms of emotional memory together with passionate imagination which give rise to the past-present-future. This seems to be a beast that only falls together with ‘being’ itself.
So I think I will be back to doing some more writing. The past few months I have been extracting myself from some weird place. It clicked the other day when I was driving and realised that experientially I could not answer with confidence to the question of ‘what is pure intent’. Something I remember experiencing almost on tap last year. I have searched for what could have led me down this weird place but I have not been able to find anything conclusive.
What I do notice is that writing gets me engaged and keeps the ball rolling so here we are.
Things haven’t been all bad, rather kind of ‘meh’, kind of static, like I have not been moving any closer to my destiny. It’s like I have decided that this is as far as I am willing to travel, this is where I draw the line. But nothing like a few months of living the ‘tried and true’ to realise that I want something better.
I have still been experiencing moments where reality disappears and I re-discover (with the same delight each and every time) the magical land of actuality.
One of those happened this morning as I was drifting in and out of sleep, it had that quality I wrote about before of a dimension that is completely anhedonic, as in none of those ‘affective realities’ have any existence there, those ‘flavours’ simply don’t exist, there is only the magical flavour of actuality.
Which got me thinking about something that I was never able to get to a conclusion on… Because I remember this magical flavour from my childhood, it seemed to be there a lot, there are countless memories of it.
My question is - to what extent is ‘reality’ constructed by beliefs and conditioning (that one is subject to from childhood) and to what extent does it automatically arise out of the animal instinctual passions?
Essentially what would ‘reality’ look like to someone who has not been subject to the sum total of humanity’s ignorance? Would ‘I’ even exist then?
Does ‘reality’ exist only because humans (through their ignorance) have concocted an entire belief system, an entire world. Or was ‘reality’ always going to arise due to the instinctual passions.
It’s an interesting question because when I experience this magical anhedonic world and I know with certainty that I was there so many times as a child. I begin to see that I was actually taught to be afraid, to be bored etc that those were skills I had to hone over time in order to conform to other peoples ‘reality’.
So just to what extent is all this stuff ‘made up’? It seems that it goes ALOT further than I would initially allow. It makes me wonder where would ‘I’ stand if I was never subject to this conditioning, it makes me wonder just how far it is possible to peel this conditioning back. Just how little of ‘reality’ is set in stone. I guess the magical surprise at the end is that none of it is actually set in stone haha 
Although right now I still see all this through the lens of nature (passions) vs nurture (conditioning), which I suspect to be the mistake causing the confusion.
I think I am starting to get to the bottom of what has been going on, of this reluctance to allow pure intent, perhaps even actively blocking it.
Whichever way I go about it, in order to continue allowing pure intent more and more ‘I’ must be letting go of the controls in a corresponding manner, as depicted below in my awesome graph
Pure intent <——[+]——————————> Control
[+] = ‘me’
I can very well observe these opposing forces in operation. To move towards control is all that is familiar to ‘me’ and therefore ‘I’ assume that it is the safer and more sensible way to travel. Even though direct experience shows that actually it is the rotten way to travel.
The way of pure intent is a funny one because it is actually the safe way, however because it cares not for the specific way in which ‘I’ would like things to play out, it is perceived as dangerous. It is a path where ‘I’ have no control and yet ‘I’ observe each time again that all is better that way.
The thing is that it is not possible to proceed whilst subtly trying to maintain control, or kind of hanging back and ‘feeling it out’ in order to make up my mind that it’s safe/beneficial to proceed. There is that daring component for ‘I’ must proceed without knowing in advance the specific way in which it will play out, all that ‘I’ can know is that it will be perfect.
Moving towards pure intent is like this stagnant, musky, shadowy construct stepping out into something so fresh, so dynamic that it will be dissolved in no time!
Am I trying to remain in the paddling pool of ‘being an actualist’ and removing further shrapnels of conditioning whilst remaining a ‘self’, because I cannot accept this obvious next step which is to proceed fully towards purity, towards the ending of ‘being’. For I could distract myself like this forever haha
I’ve thought about this too, albeit in different forms. My understanding: If the person is raised with no social conditioning, perhaps by wolves, there’s a chance they’d just be the instinctive/intuitive sense of self without a ‘real world.’ But, since they possess the necessary intelligence, at any point in their life they could reflect on that sense of self and create an idea of self. This may naturally happen around 2yrs anyway. It’s my opinion that this idea of self creates the rules and properties of the real world, and the idea of self is shaped by beliefs and conditioning. The instinctual self breaths life into it and makes it feel ‘real.’ A person who is purely an instinctual being would seem “very present” much like how other animals seem alert. But they wouldn’t be relaxed.
It may seem like the invention of the ‘self’ is a problem, but from a historic perspective I think it helped humankind make considerable advancements before the printing press. Similar to the instinctual programming passed down via genetics, our ancestors passed down intelligent programming to their offspring in the form of conditioning, so as to better survive and live in the current ‘real world’ where identities interact and depend on each other. Each new generation would refine this programming for better or worse, and continue the process. It’s here that the real world is created for an entity to live and play in. Without it you’d be unfit to live in 2023.
It’s all made up.
By 1900 the world literacy rate was only at 20%, not that great, but many western countries were around 50%. Intelligence was blossoming and society was changing rapidly, for the first time in human history as far as I know. A mere 90yrs later we had our first actually free person who happened to be high school drop out. The millenniums of human beliefs and conditioning, and the mega-annums of instinctual programing, all wiped out because someone had the wits and courage to throw away conventional wisdom, and walk away from the safety of the herd. It’s the only way anything gets done around here!
Question: Do you ever try to immolate? In an “allowing oneself” sort of way? Have you ever tried to persist at that for a few weeks?
Yeah there’s been all sorts of attempts to self immolate on my part but I think they barely scratched the surface in terms of what’s needed for it to actually happen.
Usually it would be a case of me splitting myself in 2 with one part wilfully and heroically trying to force the other to die, of course this never works.
On the other hand I can see now that it is not necessarily that different to any other decision, the question is do I genuinely want it?
The problem being that if the answer to the above is currently no (which it clearly is) then how can I sincerely make myself want to do something which I don’t actually want to do
And really what I can see is that there isn’t some recipe for it, the commitment has to organically build and so the entire period of being an actualist is a very long period of trying to make one’s mind up lol
I guess the problem with this whole process was that along with useful information for survival etc what was passed down each generation was a mound of ignorance and superstition, the end product of which is the real world.
I was kind of wondering what would it have looked like if humans didn’t go into the delusion of spirituality/religion for example, could reality even sustain itself in the absence of those beliefs? It seems to me the answer is no.
Without those ‘beings’ who discovered the ‘metaphysical realms’ and then propagated delusions down through the ages, the ‘self’ would surely be kaput by now.
Perhaps, or you might end up with a real world heavily slanted towards materialism.
But how could you have materialism without spiritualism? At core all of the real word values come from the belief in the metaphysical.