Roy's Journal

[roy]

@roy

If you seek more information you will see that intrinsic to this type of meditation is to “see” that there is actually no ‘self’ at all, all that can be experienced is a series of sensations

Ok… your description here doesn’t seem that far from self-immolating to get rid of the “‘self’ as a mediator, interpreter, censor or spoiler” so that “all is directly evidenced by the physical senses” (Peter, in the introduction). Can you please clarify how these are different? Is it the difference between experiencing the sensations and being the sensations? I never really understood what that actually means.

I ended up trying to do my homework here and answer it myself but I don’t know enough about spiritualities to do a comparison so I described it instead. It’s Actualism 101 but it won’t hurt me to recap:

In Actualism you recognize that there is a fabriquated/imagined self. This psychological self is simply a combination of instinctual passions (the instinctual being: your biologic default programming) accompanied of beliefs (the social identity/societal conditioning) and resulting emotions. To become actually free is to get rid of it (what is referred to as psychological/psychic self-immolation). As a result, you don’t try to transcend the physical world, what happens is that you stop experiencing sensations, you become the sensations (there’s no intermediary: there’s no thinker of thoughts or feeler of feelings) in which there is no interference of thoughts, beliefs or emotions. There’s a shift in which you stop focusing intently on specific objects or thoughts and instead a broader awareness of all types of unfiltered sensory input emerges and so everything becomes more engaging and delightful (because there’s no self to distort anything).

Becoming sensations instead of experiencing sensations can be felt during a PCE:

@Vineeto

So that you don’t confuse a PCE with other choiceless or thoughtless happenings, and thus miss out on the genuine experience of perfection – here is one description of a PCE –

Richard: A peak experience (PCE) is when everything is seen to be already perfect – it always has been and always will be – and that ‘I’, the self, have been standing in the way of the perfection being apparent. Normally the mind perceives through the senses and sorts the data received according to its predilection; but the mind itself remains unperceived … it is taken to be unknowable. In a PCE there is apperception operating. Apperception happens when the ‘who’ inside abdicates its throne and a pure awareness occurs. The PCE is as if one has eyes in the back of one’s head; there is a three hundred and sixty degree awareness and all is self-evidently clear. This is knowing by direct experience, unmediated by any ‘who’ whatsoever. One is able to see that the ‘who’ of one has been standing in the way of the perfection and purity that is the essential nature of this moment of being here becoming apparent. Here a solid and irrefutable native intelligence can operate freely because the ‘thinker’ and the ‘feeler’ are extirpated.

Then what one is (‘what’ not ‘who’) is these sense organs in operation: this seeing is me, this hearing is me, this tasting is me, this touching is me, this smelling is me, and this thinking is me. Whereas ‘I’, the identity, am inside the body: looking out through ‘my’ eyes as if looking out through a window, listening through ‘my’ ears as if they were microphones, tasting through ‘my’ tongue, touching through ‘my’ skin, smelling through ‘my’ nose, and thinking through ‘my’ brain. Of course ‘I’ must feel isolated, alienated, alone and lonely, for ‘I’ am cut off from the magnificence of the world as-it-is (the actual world) by ‘my’ very presence. (Richard, List B, No. 20, 15 Feb 1998).

And here is another sent in today by a forum-member –

JesusCarlos: I remember a wonderful moment in particular during that PCE. My gaze was fixed on the horizon, far away, and beyond the horizon, towards what was no longer visible. A thought associated with infinity arose: what I really am has the capacity to see very far, further than what is considered normal. This is its true capacity. To be able to see beyond the present, towards the enormous and infinite of this vast universe. And with that gaze, to look again at the immediate: there was perfection. (link)

I went over this again… because I began to question if what I had were PCEs. I think they were.

What I have, I can only describe how it feels like, when I remember it, after it ends. And it’s like if it was a “dream” in the sense that everything was perfect and happened automatically without me intervening at all (no choices, no doubts, no emotions…) and in the sense that I had no notion of time passing. Colors and taste can be described as perfect, I can see that. But I can’t say that when I hear “becoming the sensations” I’m reminded of how it felt like. In a way, in these episodes I don’t realize how different I am: it’s simply that everything works out great and I’m not messing it up and I’m not thinking about it.