OK so I find this super fascinating, there is an experience which I have written about before, first couple of weeks into giving actualism a good go I found myself with my gf at the time walking through the park and just enjoying and appreciating.
I remember saying to her (and this was so precious for me to experience) that all my life I always had to do all these things in order to be happy. For me personally it was always related to various achievements, when I get better at my sport then I get to be happy, when I am looked up to by others then I get to be happy etc.
So the goal deep down was always the same, I just wanted to enjoy and appreciate being alive but in my normal mode I had to go through things in order to qualify for it. That day in the park though I no longer had to do any of that and what a load it was that was temporarily lifted.
For example I never liked going on holidays because when I am there I am too busy thinking about how I am not working towards my achievements. That day for the first time since I could remember I was delighted about the prospect of going on holiday just to enjoy and appreciate, end of.
Right there I ‘cut out the middleman’ and I saw that all my life I could have been going straight to it, simply enjoying and appreciating, that I have been wasting this simple opportunity each moment again because I believed that I had to ‘go through’ things in order to qualify for happiness.
It’s kind of like when I am young and I realise that I like girls, I want to enjoy their company and all that it entails. But in order to do that, to attract them, I enter the rat race of male to male competition, in order to be noticed. So now in order to have that simple wish, I had to build an entire identity of being a man, to go through it only to get what I wanted all along.
This is essentially what Richard discovered, that all this stuff that humanity gets up to is not needed, that we can go straight to the source, straight to enjoying and appreciating, and from that point there is no longer a need to do those extra things, because the ultimate is already being lived.
It makes me think about how all emotions are distortions of the actual, the goal is the same all along, to enjoy and appreciate, but as an identity I have to go through hell and hope that I qualify for the reward at the end of it. Whereas Richard found that it is possible to simply side-step that entire thing and go straight into enjoying and appreciating (the goal all along).
Now the annoying thing is that 4 years later from that park experience I still do not live what I saw each moment again. There is this big construct I created in the hopes of qualifying for happiness through humanity. I am afraid that if I simply go for enjoyment and appreciation that I will be left worse of, because that entire construct will be no longer needed. But of course this fear is all back to front, it won’t be needed because I will be living what I wanted anyways and without having to do anything extra. I guess it is a case of unraveling the mess sufficiently so that I can clearly see this to be the case.