With respect to EE and the self, this excerpt is clarifying:
Richard: […] As for this term ‘excellence experience’, it is being suggested to represent the penultimate … the best of what can be experienced, in what is termed ‘virtual freedom’, wherein ‘I’ am so thinly in existence ‘I’ am virtually not there.
I use the word ‘virtual’ deliberately (it has nothing to do with the virtual reality of cyber-space) as ‘virtual’ means ‘almost as good as’ or ‘nearly the same as’ or ‘in effect comparable to’ and so on. This is because it is humanly possible to thoroughly improve one’s lot in life, before the ultimate happens, wherein one lives in a well-earned happy and harmless way 99% of the time … and which is streets ahead of normal human expectations.
Selected Correspondence: Pure Consciousness Experience
And I think the following is one of the best to clarify the differences and similarities between EE, IE and PCE:
Richard: […] regarding how the intimacy experience (IE) differs from an excellence experience (EE): qualitively they are much the same, or similar, insofar as with both experiences there is a near-absence of agency – the beer rather than the doer is the operant – whereupon naïveté has come to the fore, such as to effect the marked diminishment of separation, and the main distinction is that the IE is more people-oriented, while the EE tends to be environmental in its scope.
In other words, with an EE the ‘aesthetic experience’ feature, for instance, or its ‘nature experience’ aspect, for example, tends to be more prominent, whilst with an IE the ‘fellowship experience’ characteristic, for instance, or its ‘convivial experience’ quality, for example, comes to the fore. In either type of near-PCE – wherein the experiencing is of ‘my’ life living itself, with a surprising sumptuosity, rather than ‘me’ living ‘my’ life, quite frugally by comparison, and where this moment is living ‘me’ (instead of ‘me’ trying to live ‘in the moment’) – the diminishment of separation is so astonishing as to be as-if incomprehensible/ unbelievable yet it is the imminence of a fellow human’s immanence which, in and of itself, emphasises the distinction the most.
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