Syd: Thank you for the “change in your ‘being’” explanation; I hadn’t seen that way. This is something to keep in mind, certainly.
Hi Syd,
Here is the relevant part of the quote from Richard I posted –
Richard: Reach down inside of yourself intuitively (aka feeling it out) and go past the rather superficial emotions/ feelings (generally in the chest area) into the deeper, more profound passions/ feelings (generally in the solar plexus area) until you come to a place (generally about four-finger widths below the navel) where you intuitively feel you elementarily have existence as a feeling being (as in ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being … which is ‘being’ itself). [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List D, Syd, 26 May 2009).
Instead of “change in your ‘being’” I should have more precisely said change in the perception of your ‘being’ as I laid it out in the beginning of the sentence – “you will experience a change in the way you feel, in your attitude and general outlook, where, for instance, women are no longer prey or objects of sexual desire but likeable fellow human beings to enjoy their company whatever form that may take”. (link) As you have reported yourself on occasion, when naiveté operates there is an immense tangible change in how you are.
Syd: Regarding your reiteration of Kuba’s posts, what I’ve always found odd is that nobody has so far given a detailed report of this ‘desire’ and the various forms it takes. (link)
Why do you need others’ “detailed report” to know how to proceed? Richard, Peter, Vineeto, Geoffrey and others proceeded to dive into their psyche without such reports, guided by pure intent, the intent to leave no stone unturned with the overriding aim to actualise what the PCE revealed to be possible. Actualism is something you do by yourself, a unilateral change for the benefit of you and every body.
Here is a useful insight from Adam –
Adam-H: (…) I see again that the key is the genuine willingness/ readiness, it makes total sense to me and fits with my past intermittent experiences. When that willingness/ readiness is there, the practice is hardly even a practice, it’s effortless. But again it feels like this is just saying “here is what it is like when it works.” How does one make an identity… (end of initial reaction)
Vineeto: Hi Adam,
This is a very insightful post and well worth keeping for future references. When the readiness is there then there is no conflict, not one side trying and the other side resisting.
Adam-H: While writing that phrase out I had this thought “wait, I am that identity, I don’t have to ‘make’ it do anything I can just do it.” I can see how I reacted to bad feelings – by becoming a virtuously impatient identity whose narrative is a story about being special for wanting to feel good. As soon as I saw that, there was a feeling of having my ‘split’ self fuse back together with my relatively more naive but stressed self. This consolidated ‘me’ was able to then instantly go back to feeling good because it saw that it was silly to feel good when it was entirely up to me how to feel. I think this is the clearest I’ve ever been on the point that sincerity can unlock naivety.
Vineeto: Excellent – when you had the realisation that “wait, I am that identity” that is the same as realising that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’ – no conflict, simply the choice to be whatever feeling you prefer to be. It’s great, isn’t it, when you discover some of the tricks ‘I’ get up to – and once you see it, the trick no longer works and you do feel good. And this is the key to sincerity.
So should you ever struggle to get out of feeling bad, look for this sincerity, the “willingness/ readiness” and see what happens.
(…)
Richard: Indeed it is … so in order to successfully escape one needs to abandon the known path, the familiar path, the path that does not deliver the goods, so that the energy one is frittering away fruitlessly is available for the unknown path, the unfamiliar path, the path that does deliver the goods. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List B, James3, 1 Nov 2002)
(Actualvineeto, Adam-H, 8 Jan 2026)
If you can clearly see the point Kuba is making that “that it was my desire which was keeping me a slave” (link) and when you have the readiness to no longer follow the demands of this passion, this cause of your slavery, then it can happen in an instant – if “that willingness/ readiness is there”. If it is not there (yet), then one is often easily diverted in to all sorts of ‘trying’ by asking more questions, analysing one’s ever-changing kaleidoscope of feelings, finding fault with others and similar tricks of ‘me’ to keep the standard quo.
This early description from Peter might also be relevant, if only to recognize any emotional patterns –
Peter to Alan: Thus it was that I actively practiced denial and transcendence – new tricks to add to the denial and repression of ‘bothersome’ feelings and emotions that I had been taught as a child. Transcendence is such a wonderfully seductive option, for one gets to swan along, literally with one’s head in the clouds, literally above it all. The real world problems of money, relationship, corruption and greed, and the feelings of anger, sorrow and melancholy were still around but ‘I’ was not part of it. The ‘real’ world became a tolerable nuisance – I was not going to let it bother me – the new spiritual ‘me’. (Peter, AF List, Alan-d, 19.3.2000).
It describes how the mechanism of the old paradigm operated, nowadays further disguised by cloaking those “clouds” in new words gleaned from reports of fully free people such as “common consciousness”, “immanence-in-consciousness”, “being genderless, formless, ageless and vast”, “sense of fixed physicality falling apart” (see link) and ‘transcendence’ renamed as “channeling into”, “by-passing” or simply ignoring uncomfortable feelings.
I am not suggesting you are still doing all this but the old paradigm has been operating for thousands of years and hence appears to be the first measure to take when in an emotional crisis. Actualism is not about controlling the feelings but by recognizing and looking at them you eventually get an insight into the pattern of the workings of your identity and see how silly it is to keep doing what you have been programmed to do. And if you first don’t succeed, keep looking (after getting back to feeling good, of course).
From another thread –
Syd: (…) I simply decided to give up those post-arousal mechanisms; they are just not worth holding on to. Simple as!
I now see what Vineeto means by "[enjoying] their company whatever form that may take". And more importantly, I rediscovered my autonomy. (link)
This is an excellent practical example of what I was describing above – “when you have the readiness to no longer follow the demands of this passion, this cause of your slavery, then it can happen in an instant”.
Cheers Vineeto