Kub933's Journal

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724

New childhood memory unlocked :smile: It’s so cool because I forgot the existence of this place but now I remember I have been back there in my dreams.

It was back in Poland when I was a little kid, there was a market that me and my friends would venture out to, in Poland kids are given more or less free reign to go anywhere so we would go on all sorts of adventures.
The entrance to the market was like entering this tunnel, it was narrow and had stalls selling all sorts of stuff either side.
There was normal stuff like food and clothes but also things like toy guys, fireworks and this weird sniffing tobacco that we would try to get hold of :joy:

It was just a market but I remember what it was like entering the place, it really was like some fairy tale adventure. I remember one day there was a sun eclipse that apparently wasn’t going to happen for another 100 years or something and everyone was looking up at the sun through little bits of plastic, this was like all the excitement I could handle, it was a whole other world of wonder and adventure.

I think this memory has come up today because of the experience in my previous post, because I have been experiencing that same fairy tale ambience.

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So I just had the coolest experience ever, it’s kind of hard to put it into words but it seems so obvious when it is seen. Just for a brief moment I could see just what it means that ‘I’ have never existed in the first place.

It’s like for a few seconds I saw life through the eyes of that which is actual only, it’s very obvious that I am this flesh and blood body but then looking back to find ‘me’ it is seen that ‘I’ never was in the first place. And this is what I am struggling to put into words, the extent of ‘my’ non existence, there is just nothing at all to be found or that could be grasped in any way, shape or form.

I don’t know if any words really do it justice because (to a ‘self’ reading these words) everything gives the impression that ‘I’ have some kind of ‘substance’, how else could it be… But truly looking back from that place there was never anything there to begin with.

So I can see actual freedom is to live the fact that I am this flesh and blood body only, that this is all there was all along. And this is what is so utterly freeing and at the same time so plainly obvious, almost matter of fact. What a delightful condition to exist in, with all illusion dispelled only the facts remain and then all is so clear, how could it be any other way!

Oh and I just remembered how it happened that I serendipitously landed in this seeing. I was looking at some plans and schemes that as always I am spinning and I could see how they are just getting in the way and THEN this interesting thought occurred - ‘Why do I care for these when the world ‘I’ exist in is not even genuine’, I guess this triggered the memory of another PCE where it was seem that ‘I’ merely exist in some bubble of illusion that has no actual substance. And so I was catapulted into experiencing this for myself as a fact now, except that I was launched a step further into seeing that ‘I’ never was in the first place lol.

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So recently harmlessness has come into my attention and I have been exploring it today. One of the observations I have made is that there is a difference between being harmless in a moral/legal sense and being harmless in an actualist sense. I am harmless in a moral/legal sense but I am not harmless in the actualist sense.

An example would be dealing with a disgruntled customer at work. I can act according to the prescribed moral/legal ways, I will say sorry and thank you and I will do my best to help etc and yet I catch myself at the same time delivering a ‘psychic jab’.

This is where the cunning aspect comes in and this is the game that each social identity plays. Because objectively they can never prove it, as far as society is concerned I have behaved as an upstanding citizen.
Yet I feel/know deep down (and so does the other) that the ‘psychic jab’ was delivered.

The other interesting thing is that unless I am harmless I cannot be sincere. For if I was to be sincere about my malice I would not be acting in accord with the expected ways of society. Sooner or later I would be punished and forced into submission. Which means that for a social identity the only way to remain moral is to continue being cunning, so sincerity is thrown out the window.

As a social identity I live a perverted life, because I have to continue moulding and manipulating how I am seen by society in order to hide this underlying malice, which is there even when I am ‘being good’.
I live with the fear of being found out for the fraud that I am, even though I act in accord with the highest morals, I know that the ‘psychic jab’ was thrown out and so I also know that the other felt it.
Taking all this into consideration it is obvious how this affects intimacy, for how can human beings have genuine intimacy when we are all playing this cunning and malicious game, and this is what it means to be ‘normal’.

This game is also an obstacle to freedom, how can I be enjoying and appreciating when I have to constantly engage with all this extra activity - Making sure I am ‘good’, making sure that I cover my tracks, making sure others see me a certain way, worrying about the retaliation from others, worrying about being found out etc.

There is so much more to write here but the main thing is that in order to be happy I must be harmless, however this harmlessness is not just a moral/legal harmlessness. I can be the most upstanding citizen and still ‘be’ malice, still emit those vibes.
So it is kind of like shifting gears into a whole different standard now, away from merely looking at overt expressions of malice and focusing on all those ‘psychic jabs’ that I am sending out, no matter how small.

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There’s something I have been considering lately which is to do with control and lack of fulfilment.

When I am in ‘normal’ mode and busying myself with plans and schemes and attempts at control etc I notice that life is very much like Groundhog Day, it’s just this empty/meaningless/boring repetition of the same old.

There is some fundamental dissatisfaction with life, like it’s missing some vital component, something dynamic.

Of course in a PCE it’s not like that at all but even down the line when I am allowing pure intent and feeling good/great/excellent this bland/empty component is not there either.

What I noticed lately is that this is a drama completely of my own making. Because when in that ‘normal’ mode I apparently yearn for something dynamic, exciting, fresh. Yet at the same time I am the one so obsessed with control, with constantly scripting and trying to play out a ‘future’ of my making.

So I complain that life is an endless repetition of the same old and yet I am the one who insists on playing this game of control, perhaps as some attempt to ‘stay safe’.

So in a sense I am getting exactly what I am wishing for. I want to control and pre-script every aspect of ‘the future’ so that I can live it out in ‘safety’. And it is this habit which makes life bland and repetitive.

So I had this thought the other day - “If I want life to be exciting then why don’t I let the universe surprise me each moment again?”
Why not allow life to happen of its own accord, outside of my script and control. Then I can have the fulfilment I am looking for without having to do any specific activities (which is what I currently do to escape my self-induced blandness)

I remember a while back Srinath wrote about doing nothing and he mentioned that doing nothing is a delight. Right now my MO is that doing nothing is empty and bland, I feel that I am always trying to ‘go somewhere’, I am escaping this blandness and looking for satisfaction in achievements, schemes and dreams.

But Richard mentions in his journal many times that it is the fact of being here which is satisfying, not any specific activity. Whereas I have turned this upside down, I have (through control) made life fundamentally bland and now I seek fulfilment (which is available freely in the ordinary) in some ‘special place’.

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Another way to summarise this is something else that Srinarh wrote about the discoveries of an actualist being akin to finding oneself genuinely and unexpectedly laughing at a joke as opposed to planning out the right time and intensity of the laugh as the joke is being told (paraphrasing here haha)

So I see life going in the same way, the way of actuality is the first one, each moment again fascinated to find out just what is happening and the ‘normal way’ is the second one of planning and scripting - standing back.

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There is a third thing I’ve been looking at here also. It’s what Richard describes in the journal when he writes about being activated by pure intent to build the amazing garden.

He describes himself having done all this activity but it all seeming like play, but what is interesting is that he did not act according to a plan, he acted when he was moved by an irresistible impulse.

So again the ‘normal way’ of getting things done requires an outside force which demands that one acts according to the plan, this brings inevitable resentment and the various issues around lacking motivation etc.

And so I notice myself the same way, maybe I have planned to do some weightlifting when I finish work at 1:30 sharp, and I cannot escape this feeling of being bullied by this. In the best case scenario I go ahead and complete the activity in blandness.

And then I try the other way, I allow myself to live without the plan… and sure enough at 13:43 I experience this sudden burst of energy as I find that I want to go and do some weightlifting!

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I was just writing some notes and something became clear, that the ‘self’ comes before the ‘real world’. The ‘real world’ is not primary to the actual world ok… but it is not even primary to the ‘self’.

The ‘real world’ is a projection ‘I’ cast out in an attempt to escape/distract from ‘my’ fundamental nature, which is to be forever separated from all of existence.
So ‘I’ have an agenda in continuing to sustain this projection, in making it seem genuine. It is a home ‘I’ make for ‘myself’ where ‘I’ can make palatable the otherwise unbearable sorrow of being a ‘self’.

But the cool thing is that seeing it from this angle has kind of poked a big hole in ‘reality’, I can see what it is vs what role ‘I’ play. ‘I’ am the root cause of all the problems and ‘reality’ is a convenient sandpit ‘I’ get to play in whilst escaping the gaping hole that is ‘me’.

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So lately something is clarifying itself, it’s what Geoffrey referred to in one of the zoom chats about why one would be enjoying even though one is in a penitentiary. He mentions that it is not about enjoying the penitentiary but rather enjoying this moment of being alive, enjoying being here, which is the same as saying that enjoyment is unconditional.

So this always seemed like some riddle haha and Geoffrey does mention that it took him many PCEs to see this.

This morning I woke up, made my way downstairs and briefly found myself here where this moment is happening. I took very quick note of something that was essential to this experience, the experiential answer to the riddle.

What I noticed immediately was an enjoyment that was unconditional in the most absolute sense. This enjoyment was not caused by anything, it was not a result of anything, it was not dependent on anything etc rather it was intrinsic to the fact of being here now.
This enjoyment was everywhere all at once, which is the same as saying it was nowhere in particular. Basically it had no specific location, it was not some separated ‘thing’ but rather it was an intrinsic fact of existence itself.
It was completely ordinary due to the above factors and yet it was completely satisfying.
So basically in that place it is impossible not to enjoy and appreciate haha.

This enjoyment was also kind of quiet/smooth… weird words to use but I guess it is because I am comparing it to emotions which are loud, dramatic and volatile. This enjoyment is more like the constant realisation that all of existence is perfect because there is nowhere else.

So it’s a different category of enjoyment vs emotions. Because emotions operate on this lack/acquisition dynamic, basically there is a hole and this hole is briefly filled by a good feeling and then it reappears again to be filled and so on. So the way of enjoyment via emotions is to provide a fix to that which is lacking.
Whereas this enjoyment is different because it is due to the fact that nothing at all is lacking/could ever be lacking, which means it is stable in a way that emotions could never even get close to. It’s a stability that (in the most absolute sense) could never ever be breached.

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It’s kind of mind-blowing to contemplate this, that in actuality it is an impossibility to find imperfection. I don’t think any words can describe the strength of this haha because it is simply a fact.

And so this is why in actuality there is a total safety/security, it’s because perfection is a 100% guarantee, there is simply no place else in existence, it could never not be perfect.

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So I’ve been looking at this bit that Richard writes in his journal :

“Other than the essential physical planning required for the smooth running of my day-to-day activities I have no idea at all as to what I want to do with my life … and this constant realisation is ambrosial”

I have been getting a flavour of what he is writing about here, of living life in that way. I have also been noticing in which way I block this.
This is actually something I have been chipping away for a while now so it is great to see some kind of progress now.

What I notice primarily is that this unconditional enjoyment which I was writing about yesterday is available freely, however it exists in a place outside of all ‘my’ plans, schemes, dreams etc, it exists outside of ‘my’ control.

Basically my normal mode is to project this shadowy grid of control over life, in it’s most basic expression it might be planning out how some future event is apparently going to happen.

Then there is this second mode, the ambrosial mode where the grid disappears completely, then I have no idea at all ‘where I am going with life’, there is a sense of not even knowing for sure what I will do or what will happen in the next second. There is an experience of this vast freedom to delight in the immediacy of this moment, without having any specific direction that has been pre-laid out, nothing at all to restrict this freedom.

I had a taste of this yesterday whilst watching tv and I noticed immediately that this is exactly what Richard is referring to, so it has given me more confidence to proceed and to continue demolishing whatever leftover plans, schemes etc that I have going, to dare to live life without a plan haha

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Also the more I write and explore this whole control thing the more I realise that it’s an illusion of control. I am not actually in any control, no matter how much I scheme and plan, it’s a big lie that I am stubbornly holding onto. So I guess it’s more correct to say that it is about giving up the illusion/attempt at being in control.

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I’ve been running into this over and over with my latest dating adventure… I’ll run on for hours imagining various scenarios and conversations, and then it literally never plays out how I imagined, whether because it’s not what I hoped for, or that some fear was completely irrelevant to the facts and the actual situation was far more delightful.

After going through that so repetitively it’s become pretty transparent and lacks a lot of the seductiveness it has… together with the increasing delight in what is actually happening.

The flaw in the hyper-planning is that every new situation is different, and that I won’t know what to say until it’s happening anyway, in which case I’ll just say whatever I’ll say anyway. I can’t really guarantee that I’ll be smooth & have the answers in every situation no matter how much I try to plan now.

I have found paradoxically though that it’s better to just let myself do these brain-conversations, basically just because it’s apparently how my mind operates at this moment and it’s not like I’ll automatically stop tomorrow just because I think it’s a bad idea. I’ve had more ease since deciding it’s ok to happen, and I’ve been seeing lately that it’s less about planning a future conversation than it is about putting my own doubts to bed… if she says ‘x’ then my answer is ‘y’ is really about sorting out for myself what my own thoughts around ‘x’ are. And then I can go forward in life with a bit more confidence because I’ve sorted it out for myself. Perhaps I’ll keep revising that process, but at this moment that’s what it looks like. At some point maybe it will become apparent that there can be confidence in every situation, the answers are mostly the same for every different thing, and I can stop all this churning.

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Yeah that’s more or less the same path I’ve been going through, with regards to allowing it to play out vs fighting it whilst at the same time keeping my eyes open for something that is even better. Yeah it does seem that the ‘churning’ is more about some emotion that is underneath than anything else. Also ‘the churning’ is a good name for this, I will be calling it that from now on haha.

I’ve been watching ‘selling sunset’ on Netflix recently and for some reason it is the contrast of amazing scenery together with pointless drama that has been leading to some realisations on this ‘churning’.

What I experienced yesterday is again being drawn into this vibrant world of direct experience and then looking back at the ‘churning’ it is so obvious that ‘I’ am not in control. Like Richard says in one of the videos, ‘I get to make the little decisions like will I have a coffee now’ whereas the rest of the universe is all happening now, how could some little ‘I’ be in control of it all, it’s impossible. It’s like there’s billions of things all happening simultaneously and ‘I’ really feel like ‘I’ can be in control.

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So it’s interesting now because the target is right there, I know what I am aiming for, I know the flavour of that place where all of life is happening simultaneously of its own accord. I know that it’s utterly delightful and completely safe, I know that it is here right now for the taking and it’s not such a huge step to live it. But in order to ‘step into’ that place I cannot keep even one little part of myself around, there is no more control at all there, there is only the doing of what is happening now. It’s not scary for me anymore, it used to terrify me, living life without even a smidgen of control.

It’s like I am on the ride but I have my hand hovering around the controls to stop it, slow it down, make it change direction etc. The thing that I can’t quite do is take my hand off the controls completely. There is some kind of total irreversibility that goes along with this action. One minute I am ‘being’ and then next ‘I’ am nowhere to be found, then there is no going back to control. This is what is somewhat holding me back, the fact that once done I can’t go back into control.

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I read this many times. Hard to comprehend life without that idea of control.

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What’s so funny about all this is that the control is obviously purely an illusion… of course, how could we possibly be controlling things that are far away? And when it comes to people I’ve found over and over again that they’ll push back against any attempts.

I see this all the time in sports, fans are constantly trying to figure out what will happen in advance or somehow psychically control the team in games where the outcome is literally decided by how a little ball bounces. Even with a supercomputer you couldn’t accurately predict or model the outcome accurately, and yet we think we can. All so we can believe we can avoid some things we don’t want to happen.

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Thanks for this post Kub933! Kub933's Journal - #733 by Kub933

This was very timely for me as I’ve been struggling with just enjoying this moment. But I was going at it wrong.trying to enjoy this moment of being with kids, doing some chore, being in the supermarket, But realising I was attempting to enjoy those “situations” as opposed to enjoying “being alive” regardless of the situation. Just this realisation has seemed to flip how my brain registers the notion of “enjoying this moment”. I realised I was trying to force the enjoyment on perhaps a not enjoyable situation without really focusing on that fact of being alive in this very moment. Why did it take me this long to realise what I was doing? Haha

It also seems to overlap/ tie in/ relate/ same thing? with tapping into pure intent, I suddenly seem to be able to access a seemingly unconditional enjoyment of being alive when I consider all of this, not of feelings and emotions but inherent in the very moment being alive. I think contemplating it all triggered the current PCE that’s occurring at the moment.

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Took me about 4 years to realise the difference so I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself :laughing:

And it seems to go even deeper than enjoying the fact that I am alive. Of course I must be alive in order to know this lol but what is ultimately enjoyable is that the universe is here in its infinitude (including the flesh and blood bodies being aware of this fact).

And now I understand the difference between say someone ‘just enjoying being alive’ as some coping strategy when they have a near death experience and they want to pack in as much ‘being alive’ as possible into each moment.

What we are talking about goes even deeper, it’s an enjoyment of the fact that existence is here and there is no place else.

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Yeaaaaa that’s the good stuff

Don’t let the apparent ordinariness of it fool you! It’s infinitely better than feeling-being-ness !

And as the PCE I had where I experienced infinitude showed me, this ordinariness can ramp up to such a degree that it becomes intense, almost too much! But not in the same sense of an affective feeling at all! Intense with no cap on it!

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So on Saturday me and Sonya had a zoom with the guys and I mentioned that the past year or so I have been on this plateau, there just seems to be no more low hanging fruits or pressing issues that require attention and get me stuck in, things are good as far as it goes which means I lack the drive to proceed any further.

I am still not enjoying and appreciating each moment again though so there is still more to go, even in terms of aiming for a virtual freedom.
However because I rarely encounter any kind of acute or lasting drops into feeling bad I seem content to remain in this mediocre territory.

@henryyyyyyyyyy Asked when was the last time I had an intense emotional response (whether expressed or not) and I really couldn’t think of one, emotions do rise up but they don’t often seem to ‘stick’ and become a bad mood, or they don’t rise all the way into heights that deserve to be called suffering. So there isn’t that drive to proceed out of necessity, as in I could remain like this for the rest of my life and things would be good, yet I know (due to the PCE) that I would be missing out on something so much bigger. It is whenever I experience the purity of the actual that I am reminded of something better than what I have now, something worth aiming for.
Because even though things are good and stable, I am still susceptible (in varying degrees) to all the pitfalls of being a self, the problem is managed, not eradicated.

There is something that has come up since yesterday that I wanted to write about, an emotional reaction which has ‘stuck’ and I have followed it’s trail to find something interesting.

I was teaching a class yesterday and ended up screwing up the technique I was demonstrating, later on when attempting the very same technique in sparring I also failed. Initially there wasn’t much to it but I noticed that something stuck around after and followed me home.
When I woke up in the middle of the night to use the toilet it suddenly appeared as a pang of emotion.
When I woke up in the morning it immediately appeared in my consciousness as a stream of emotion fed thought.
I can see how they came up with the beliefs about evil spirits following you round haha, it’s just like that, except I am haunting myself lol.
So anyways I could immediately see what it was all about, self-consciousness, this acute insecurity about how I am seen by others, fed by a very real fear of not surviving and a deep sorrow at being left behind.

So I followed these feelings since and came to see that they link back to a core aspect of myself. Recently I was reading a book (The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood) where this concept of the ‘looking glass self’ was introduced. The idea being that identity is constructed as a reflection of how others see me (and therefore how they respond to me).

I would take this further and say that identity consists of beliefs/projections about how others see me, essentially what I believe that they believe about me lol.

Contemplating this got me thinking just how shaky of a construct the identity is, it really has no solid ground at all, it’s beliefs about beliefs… No wonder that the hallmark of being an identity is insecurity.

The second thing I found interesting is that taking this into consideration it becomes apparent that really it is impossible to demarcate ‘me’ from ‘them’, deep down it is all just affective mush - aka ‘I’ am ‘humanity’ and ‘humanity’ is ‘me’. As a self/identity there is no such thing as individuality.

So back to this emotional reaction, I noticed that this insecurity about how I am seen by others has been one of the main obstacles to freedom throughout my entire life.
It’s everywhere in some degree, it’s like these invisible shackles that have always been around me, restricting me from living freely.
Because I can only act within the confines of those ‘beliefs about beliefs’, this is who I am.

So far no idea how to eliminate this but its very cool too see the issue so clearly, to see just how far reaching it is and to see what a rotten effect it has on my freedom.

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