Ed:
Vineeto: How can you be “constantly on the lookout for a PCE” and simultaneously consider “the PCE has actually been a REALLY threatening thing”?
Ed: I think there are two issues in one here. The first is that I think that this relates to what y’all talk about when you refer to getting “all of your being” on-board. It feels like I’m split here. There’s a part of me that’s fearful.
I’ve been examining this topic lately and it’s hard to find the objections. The one I keep coming back to is, “it’s weird” and the more I dig into that the more silly it seems. You may recall when I visited you a short exchange we had. I believe we were talking about an experience of sweetness that occurred to a handful of people at the same time. I said something like, “The universe is so weird,” and you corrected me saying that, “It’s the human condition that’s weird.”
I have things 180-degrees backwards here, because even a brief examination of the human condition reveals it’s perverse. It’s so easy to project oneself onto actuality and find blame where there is none.
The second issue is this “being on the lookout.” Since starting the method, I’ve been more aware of how I’m feeling, thinking, etc. I think about PCEs and immolating every day. At times as I swing more into the direction of feeling gooder and gooder, “I” can get excited and then slip into reverie.
I’ve been catching it more, and writing about it certainly helps to recall.
Hi Ed,
You are certainly onto something here – every “reverie” takes you away from this moment where life is happening and where you can be attentive and change. The past is a memory and the future a reverie (or fearful fantasy) – only this moment is ever actual.
So, your challenge is to pay affective attention to how you experience this moment – and it is in this moment where you can experience being the feeling you feel and fully being it (without objection or endorsement) choose to be. For instance if you experience being angry (or fearful, or sad) you recognize and acknowledge that you are this feeling (that is all you are as an identity when you are ruthless honest with yourself). Experiencing that you are this feeling then you have the choice to be a felicitous feeling instead (recognizing that it is silly to be anger or fear or sadness).
Vineeto: Instead of inching forward towards being happy and harmless tiny step by tiny step you also have the option to take the bull by the horns, as the saying goes, and face the core of your feeling of fear –
Richard: What I did was face the fact of my mortality. ‘Life’ and ‘Death’ are not opposites … there is only birth and death. Life is what happens in between. Before I was born, I was not. Now that I am alive, I am. After death I will not be … just like before birth. Where is the problem? (Richard, List B, No. 21, 10 Mar 1998)
Ed: I remember in your video with Richard the two of you talking about the absolute end of everything. Was oblivion on your mind back then? How were you relating to it at the time?
I remember that well. Oblivion was on ‘her’ mind, as you put it. ‘She’ yearned for oblivion.
However, when Richard told ‘her’ (after the end of filming) that ‘she’ had been “very close”, ‘she’ panicked and avoided intense conversations with Richard for two years. Obviously more had to happen.
Ed: After the PCE and when I thought that I must die, even though I knew it wasn’t to be a physical death, it felt like the absolute end of everything. But that seems like a trick – because immolation isn’t the absolute end of everything. Life continues on. The body continues on.
Oh, but it is “everything” because ‘you’, the identity, has such a complete hold and control over you that nothing else exists and nothing else matters but the survival of ‘me’. The only time you can experience life without identity is during the identity’s abeyance. So it is not “like a trick”, it is the deeply felt truth (albeit not a fact).
As such, the only way to deal with the fear is to take the bull by the horns in that you stop fighting the fear – it will instantly diminish because you stop feeding it (via the resistance).
Respondent: When I feel fear, fear seems to reinforce itself and stays put.
Richard: It is not all that uncommon to feel fear feeding off itself, as it were, and mounting in intensity almost exponentially – as in a panic attack for instance – yet closer inspection reveals that it is none other than ‘me’, a fearful ‘me’, who is fuelling/ refuelling the fear (‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’) with ‘my’ own affective energy.
Respondent: When I think of any belief about the fear trigger, the fear seems to reinforce the belief.
Richard: Oh, indeed so … that is a phenomenon well-known by many a draconian.
Respondent: Each fear is a self perpetuating.
Richard: The key to success lies in realising that fear does not go anywhere (meaning that nothing ever happens except more fear). [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List AF, No. 79, 21 June 2005)
Ed: I guess I wonder if you ever resolved that fear of oblivion or if instead you took that leap of faith. Maybe it looks like a mix of two. I wonder if the immanence of immolation at that moment brought this resistance up.
‘Vineeto’ did not take “a leap of faith” at all but relied on and strengthened ‘her’ connection to pure intent. Without pure intent one is trapped in the human condition, but with pure intent operating there is an alternative way of experiencing life and a way out.
The problem you describe directly connected with this all-or-nothing approach, and of course such a leap is too big, impossible to achieve and hence you are stuck with fear. Whereas the actualism method offers a way to diminish the bulk of the identity you are, peeling off layer by layer of identity-enhancing feelings and replacing them with identity-diminishing felicitous feelings until ‘I’ grow so thin and feeble that at some point ‘I’ will agree to relinquish control and go out-from-under-control, the different-way-of-being virtual freedom Richard has described many times. (Library, Topics, Virtual Freedom). I particularly recommend the last tool-tip for your consideration.
Ed: This fear of oblivion feels like what I am at the core. I understand this echoes Richard’s language, but I can remember a few years before my PCE lamenting to an enlightened guy that all I am is fear. A fear-driven problem-solving machine.
To me, it’s like resolving this fear would mean immolating altogether. But I can see that there’s more room in the meantime for naiveté. There’s room to contemplate and lean into the fact that it is actually safe here. Fear seems to be why we lose touch with naiveté and fear seems to birth control.
I had a chat with my girlfriend a few days ago about death/ oblivion. She mentioned she wasn’t so much scared of oblivion but rather the prospect of suffering – i.e. a painful death. I agreed that I felt the same way.
But reflecting on this, I can’t help but to wonder if I am tricking myself. I suspect that if I were in a painful situation, I’d still rather live than die to relieve my suffering.
To me, the issue of oblivion seems like a big deal – like if I could resolve it, there’d be nothing left to keep me around.
Ha, here you demonstrate it again, this all-or-nothing approach. Has it ever occurred to you that this is exactly how ‘you’ avoid ever doing something practical, something tangible, which would bring about a change for the better in your life, which would work to diminish the control ‘you’ have over your life? By telling yourself that “all I am is fear” and imagine that this is the sign that you are close to immolation (“if I could resolve it, there’d be nothing left to keep me around”) you remain stuck in fear and imagination.
You are indeed “tricking” yourself but not by your intellectual projection into the future but by avoiding to even start the first step in actively applying the actualism method – “the ongoing enjoyment and appreciation of this moment of being alive” – and start feeling good/ looking at the obstacles to feeling good now.
Vineeto: From there it is easy to choose to be a different feeling.
Ed: My experience of this thus far is that I don’t have the ability to immediately control how I feel.
Of course you don’t, nobody asked you to “have the ability to immediately control how I feel”. What I said was –
Vineeto: “… start allowing yourself to first feel the feeling (instead of merely thinking about it) and then begin to acknowledge that you are the feeling you feel instead of having the feeling. From there it is easy to be a different feeling.”
Please read these two sentences again and tell me if you see the difference between what I suggested and what you made of it. If not, read it again until you do. Then put it into practice before dismissing it out of hand, or out of past experiences.
In case you have trouble understanding my summary suggestion with the relevant words made bold here is a more detailed description from a co-respondent when the penny had dropped for them –
Respondent: … incidentally, Richard, how can they be ‘an hereditary occurrence’ and be of my choosing at the same time?
Richard: You do comprehend that you are your feelings/ your feelings are you (‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’) do you not? Viz.:
• [Respondent]: ‘It has taken me a hell of a long time to understand the difference between having feelings and being those feelings. Because I have not clearly understood this, I’ve never quite got the hang of paying attention to feelings without praise or blame, and without notions of innocence and culpability, right and wrong, etc getting in the way.
This makes things very interesting. The moment I regard my ‘self’ as ‘having’ a feeling, I’m split down the middle and there’s a secondary reaction on the part of the social identity (an urge to “do something“ about the feeling, which in turn evokes more feelings, and so on). Conversely, if I recognise that I am the feeling, it most often dissolves into thin air – and usually pretty quickly too.
This is great. It’s especially helpful with regard to anger and frustration which have been two of my biggest hurdles to date. Previously, when I caught myself being angry, annoyed or frustrated, identifying and paying attention to this feeling would NOT cause it to disappear. On the contrary, the feeling and the awareness of myself as ‘having’ it would sometimes become like a microphone and amplifier locked into a screaming feedback loop.
I’m really pleased that this is no longer happening. It seems almost too easy’. [emphasis in original]. (Thursday 28/10/2004 6:55 PM AEST).
And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is. (Richard, AF List, No. 60g, 30 Oct 2005a).
Ed: (…) But I can’t necessarily choose from that point to start feeling excellent. Or can I? If that’s the case, why not choose to go into a PCE or immolate? (link)
Here it is again – the all-or-nothing approach, or the search for a short-cut, just so you don’t have to apply yourself to do it step by step. How much longer do you want to procrastinate doing something practical and tangible that has worked for others? Why waste all this time waiting/ searching for instant gratification when you take your life into your own hands and start feeling good now, the only moment you can actually experience.
I highly recommend re-reading Richard’s Article of This Moment of Being Alive, including the very helpful tool-tips.
Cheers Vineeto