Quotes

RICHARD: “You see … what if I had indulged in this intellectual type of bovine faecal matter verbiage when answering your ‘child on a bike’ question. What if I had said: ‘Oh there is no danger when whizzing around a blind corner … your concern is all ‘based on some conception of a certain loss that can only be the outcome of active imagination?’ This is what wanking looks like in print.”

Translated:

If I had engaged in bullshit the way you did, I would be a wanker just like you.

This was an interesting read, thanks for reminding me of this page @Andrew. I forgot about these details and that Richard had home schooled as well.

I find what he says about giving your children too much licence of great interest. A lot of the troublesome children in my area that have recently bullied my kids, I notice have just no boundaries and seem to have total free reign. They really don’t give a shit about the consequences, they are not phased by being told off, etc. My brothers were like this though and my parents did discipline him so it is not always due to lack of boundaries. This type of behaviour including my brothers, it always annoyed me lol.

Richard’s view on being a friend with your child seems so difficult for me and radical. I became friends with my dad eventually but because I made the effort to want to know him and understand him, not the other way around. I think at present, maybe from my children’s perspective, I have a more Jekyll and Hyde personality, clearly flipping from felicitous to irritable or low mood. I hope that being in my company is not too stressful for them.

My parents very much had a shut up and do as your told attitude for some things but then could be open and liberal on others, again a sort of confusing mix. I often feel very lost in parenting, like I am just winging it.

The following on that page also struck me:

RESPONDENT: 2) How old were your children when you became actually free and how did that event affect them and their/your relationship?

RICHARD: They would have been, respectively, about twenty five years of age, twenty four, eighteen and seventeen; at the time none of them were affected as they were not around to notice anything (they were all scattered far and wide living their own lives); my association – there is no relationship in actuality – with them is no different than with any other fellow human being … and which fellowship regard they all have, to varying degrees, had some perplexity in accommodating themselves to (as exemplified by the second-youngest saying, at age twenty two or thereabouts, that she sometimes wished she had had a normal father as, unlike her then girlfriends who were getting married and having children of their own, she had ‘inherited’ a quest to pursue and could not settle down)

there is no relationship in actuality
This always comes back to mind…it seems so radical to me.

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it’s not for nothing that Richard writes somewhere that he is the most subversive man to have ever lived

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Richard: …why not set feeling good (a general feeling of well-being) as a bottom-line of experiencing so it can become ‘second-nature’ to feel good, each moment again come-what-may, sooner rather than later?

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PETER: As an actualist, I always put the aim to be harmless towards my fellow human beings first and my aim for happiness second, because it is impossible for me be happy unless I am harmless. For anyone who is sincere about peace on earth it is essential to put becoming harmless first … and then increased happiness invariably follows. In the case in point, if one stops being sarcastic, as in expressing bitter or wounding remarks to others, then one has more chance of being happy … which in turn means that one has less reason to feel cynical …which in turn means one is less prone to be sarcastic and so on … until both cynicism and sarcasm eventually disappear as if by magic. It’s a fascinating business to see, and experientially understand, how feelings are interlinked, how they produce an endless cycle of ups and downs, how there is a continuous tendency to wound and then feel wounded, how there is a seesaw sequence of excitement and boredom … and so on.

http://actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/frequentquestions/FAQ01a.htm#2

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RESPONDENT: After all, you are against Rajneesh.

PETER: No, it is nothing personal. There have been about one thousand Enlightened Ones, according to one figure I have read, and all of them were deluded, and all of them promised the un-deliverable. They only have power and authority because people desperately want to believe the fairy stories of an ‘after-life’ and another ‘world’. This belief in the Divine-ness of the God-men is given credence by the feelings of love for Them and the self-gratifying feeling of being a chosen one. The chance for a genuine personal peace and an actual global peace is forfeited on the altars of the God-men – all for a bit of utterly selfish ‘feel-good’.

Source

As feeling beings we are very susceptible to psychic emissions from others and this is part and parcel of our instinctual survival mechanism. Apart from considerations for my physical safety when somebody gets angry, I found that my core fear in these situations was to be ‘found out’ for the fraud ‘I’ am – as Alan said it so succinctly in his recent letter to Richard. It’s been an ongoing process from realizing for the first time in a pure consciousness experience that ‘I’ am a fraud to translating this realization into daily discoveries as to how much this alien impostress has been running, and ruining, my life. As I am the one who on my own accord is investigating my own fraudulent existence, nobody else can expose me more than I am already doing so myself! And I am not only admitting that ‘I’ am a fraud, ‘I’ am also ready and willing to take the cure – ‘self’-immolation.

Vineeto

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RESPONDENT No 33: If you do not find the root cause/trigger of what has caused the loss of felicitous feeling, then the method has not been given its full chance.

I had this experience yesterday: I suddenly found myself amidst deep sorrow which I had described before. it was growing taking various shapes, calling all those instances that I had erred, guilt ridden, feeling other person’s sorrow, blaming how cold I had been to ‘No 60’ in my mails, fearing an attack from ‘No 60’ and ‘No 53’ etc. I was once again in the midst of some seemingly unresolvable situation.

Then I said, no matter what I am going to exactly practise actualism method. I am going to recollect the last moment I felt good, and trace the trigger. I couldn’t do it. amazing amount of resistance. I hated the method. I didn’t want to go ahead. I wanted to watch the growing sorrow instead. But I said, I have to do it. No other choice. It took me 10 minutes or so and finally I was convinced that I had to find out the trigger.

And the trigger I found. I wasn’t convinced … it was a lot of trial and error search … but I found it all right. I couldn’t have found it from watching the evolution of the feelings … it was totally different. It was a total surprise. Then I finally understood actualism method. You keep finding the triggers to feeling bad and replace them with sense and disable them … you do it with common sense by feeling good as soon as possible. As long as you do not do this, you will be triggered again and again and again and you will experience the same old in different forms due to the same reasons.

So, actualism method does exactly what is required: not more, not less.

I am more and more surprised that in spite of my participation and claiming various things all along, I hadn’t put the method into practise 100%. I talk more, contradict myself a lot. But I am glad that things are dropping.

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There, like here, participants’ contributions was (still is for us…) often of as much importance as the R/V/P words.

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RESPONDENT No. 60: The way Richard put it, it sounded like he was able to simply choose the way he felt, and seemed surprised that others could not.

RESPONDENT: It does sort of give that impression.

RICHARD: It does far more than merely give that impression … it is precisely what I am saying. For a recent instance:

• [Co-Respondent]: ‘I think its important to be free of malice (…) but I’m not sure why we need to free of sorrow.
• [Richard]: ‘You do not need to be free of sorrow (or malice) … it is your choice, and your choice alone, each moment again as to how you prefer to experience this moment of being alive (the only moment you are ever alive)’.

If then choosing to be as happy and as harmless (as free of both malice and sorrow and their antidotal pacifiers love and compassion) as was humanly possible thus makes the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body, back in 1981, a freak of nature then so too is my current companion as she comprehended right from the beginning that it is her choice, and her choice alone, each moment again as to how she prefers to experience this moment of being alive (the only moment she is ever alive) … and which would also make my previous companion a freak of nature as well (not forgetting to mention, of course and for the very reason of it being topical, both Peter and Vineeto too).

Incidentally, the identity in residence in 1981 was not surprised that others could not but, rather, that others would not (having a victim mentality, it turned out, ran much deeper than the singular mentation such nomenclature indicates).

Much, much deeper … so much so as to be past fixation, entrenchment, and well into being an impressment, an embedment bordering on an embodiment.

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RESPONDENT No. 6: If you will indulge my question: is it possible still to have actual intimacy, even if the partner (man/woman) is evidently inhibited by self and survival instincts?

RICHARD: Actual intimacy – no separation (no separative self whatsoever) cannot wax and wane/ come and go/ switch on and off here in this actual world (the world of the senses). Upon an actual freedom from the human condition an actual intimacy is the norm with every body and every thing regardless of whatever their or its current situation and circumstances might be.

(Some peoples have looked at me blankly upon being informed there is an actual intimacy with, say, an ashtray or a polystyrene cup or a pebble or whatever).

In terms of human sexuality, and due to its utter proximity, sexual congress sans identity/ affections is the exquisite experience of two flesh and blood bodies sensuously delighting in being sensually and sexually aroused.

(As there are no identities in actuality I actually interact only with flesh and blood bodies; at times this can be quite disconcerting, to say the least, for any identity feeling itself to be other than illusory).

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13 posts were split to a new topic: Harmlessness

“Now, when confronted with my fears and judgements instead of berating myself for my shortcomings one sees it as a new opportunity to investigate and explore and usually lose a few kilos of identity. Fear as an ally … who would ever think.”

-Mark

Also:

“ I have become keenly aware of the fact that my mind spends an inordinate amount of the time imagining myself to be anywhere but here and now – imagining myself in the future, imagining myself in conversation, imagining myself in a thousand different ways, situations and localities and it is such a joy to be discovering that being here takes no imagination at all!

What a remarkably simple thing!”

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6 posts were merged into an existing topic: Romantic Love is a fantasy construct

14 posts were merged into an existing topic: Harmlessness

I think i got all the ‘harmlessness’ ones, the last one you posted here was about ‘love’, I’ll leave it here. but if you want to have longer discussion then delete this one and make new topic pls :slight_smile:

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I’ve moved the the other posts related to love to Romantic Love is a fantasy construct,
starting from @henryyyyyyyyyy’s post
Romantic Love is a fantasy construct - #39 by henryyyyyyyyyy
(if you, @henryyyyyyyyyy, want that quote to stay here, please paste it again without additional text)

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RICHARD: Gratitude is one of the many ploys designed, by those who expound on the merits of self-imposed suffering, to keep one in servile ignominy and creeping despair. As strange as it may initially seem, gratitude has the same deleterious effect upon one’s well-being as the resentment it seeks to reform. When gratitude is realised as being the panacea that it is, one will gladly renounce it along with the resentment it promises to replace. To successfully dispense with the despised resentment, its companion emotion, the extolled gratitude, must also go. It is a popular misconception that one can do away with a ‘bad’ emotion whilst hanging on to the ‘good’ one. In actualism the third alternative always applies. ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’, ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’, ‘Virtue’ and ‘Sin’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Despair’, ‘Gratitude’ and ‘Resentment’, and so on, all disappear in the perfection of purity. Purity is the hall-mark of the stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe … which is the life-giving foundation of all that is apparent. Unless the factuality of the existence of the third alternative is firmly grasped, one is forever fated to shuttle back and forth between the opposites. Gratitude simply does not work for it draws its energy from resentment itself … and from nowhere else. Gratitude feeds off resentment – one cannot be grateful unless one is first resentful – and one cannot maintain any emotion without retaining its opposite. Neither does one adopt that other stratagem: transcendence. Transcendence is a form of sublimation … to transcend is to confirm and endorse the reality of the opposites. One disposes of all these pathetic methods very simply: By being here now as this flesh and blood body.

Being here now is to put your money where your mouth is, as it were. All other actions are methods, devices, techniques … which are, in effect, delaying tactics. The most sincere form of flattery is not, as is commonly practised, imitating all the other people’s performance of standing back and expressing a feeling. To feel an emotion or be passionate about life is nowhere near the same as actually being here now. In being here now one is completely involved. Being here now is total inclusion. One demonstrates one’s appreciation of life by partaking fully in existence … by letting this moment live one so that one is doing what is happening. One dedicates oneself to the challenge of being here now as the universe’s experience of itself. When ‘I’ willingly and voluntarily sacrifice ‘myself’ – the psychological or psychic identity residing inside this body – ‘I’ am gladly making ‘my’ most supreme donation, for ‘I’ am what one holds most dear.

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I remember telling a friend about giving up both the pair of opposites - gratitude and resentment…to which she asked for a practical example of some situation where this works…

I have to admit I couldn’t come up with an example at the time which means I was just parroting Richard at the time hehe…it seemed to me then that gratitude and resentment is only about the resentment towards the universe and then the gratitude towards it…or is there any other practical example from daily life where resentment n gratitude can be given up ?

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