Syd: Vineeto, thank you for ‘spell[ing] out’ (it is straightforward for me to understand).
I see a misunderstanding regarding ‘harmlessness’. It is obvious to me that it is impossible to be feeling good if I’m also not harmless. Per Richard, “The word harmless, in actualism lingo, refers to the innocuity which ensues in the absence of malice (just as the word happiness refers to the felicity which ensues in the absence of sorrow).” Furthermore (link), being happy & harmless are two sides of the same coin, in that they are inseparable.
That is certainly a pleasant surprise. Even though you mentioned that you “see the sensibility in everything” of what I said (15 Feb 2026) you nevertheless went back to the theme of morality in your highlighting Geoffrey’s Report two days later (17 Feb 2026). I am pleased you have now definitely confirmed that becoming harmless as well as happy is part and parcel of the actualism method of feeling good and enjoying and appreciating being alive.
Syd: So, in my understanding, the difference between ‘feeling good’ and ‘felicity & innocuity’ lies in the intensity à la Richard’s ‘bester’ characterization or ‘uplevelling’. Ergo, my compass of feeling good naturally involves, felicity-thus-innocuity and happiness-thus-happiness.
Finally, sincerely knowing how I am, each and every moment (see the two ‘Bonus’ quotes here as well as the “danger to other people” one here), I personally put happiness before harmlessness (if it need to be ‘sequenced’ at all as that, even though such ‘sequencing’ makes no sense per favour the ‘inseparable’ characterization above), and results speak for the sensibility it.
I see that even though you said above that “being happy & harmless are […] inseparable” you still say that “I personally put happiness before harmlessness” and “felicity-thus-innocuity” in that sequential order, and you confirmed it in your most resent post on harmlessness –
Syd: To this, I’ll add that ‘harmlessness’ can only seem like morality (at least, it has been to me)—and Kiman also brought this up above—only if considered from a position of not having already established happiness as no. 1 priority. Without happiness, considerations of harmlessness can easily devolve into moral forcing (at least, it has always for me). [emphasis by me]. (link)
It seems that your statement that both are “inseparable” is merely paying lip-service at present. For instance, if in a situation you have to choose between not creating harm even though it might impinge on your happiness, you would choose harmlessness over personal happiness? Given it has been your “priority no. 1” all these years there is a good chance that being harmless will only be a choice if it suits your happiness.
That is where putting everything on a “it doesn’t really matter” basis is of vital significance. Of course, the way I understand harmlessness is that it includes considering the wider context and ramifications one’s words and actions for the people involved.
However, if you look at the sequencing issue in a less logically/ mathematically way but more how you experience yourself (with ever more fine-tuning of your affective attentiveness for both categories) then you might eventually discover that when you are even feeling a smidgen of maliciousness, (righteous) anger, indignation, or similar feelings, you cannot call yourself being genuinely happy. In a sincere assessment of the experience of happiness and of harmlessness, there is no sequence, they are one and the same. Hence the actualism method means diminishing the impact and influence of one single package of the instinctual passions and gradually reducing both malice and sorrow.
Any attempt in separating them is and prioritising one over the other means ‘I’ create an excuse to prefer one to the other and thus corrupt the meaning of both happiness (as in including narcissistic, hedonistic or ‘self’-centric happiness) and harmlessness (for instance dutiful, morally superior, pacifistic behaviour adjustments, or that one sometimes needs aggression to survive), with the result that it perverts the actualism method so that ‘I’ can remain in control.
Since you have re-introduced the ‘Harmlessness’ thread today, and I found a clarifying post from Claudiu regarding this topic of wanting to separate out harmless from happiness.
Syd: So, obviously, I know that absence-of-malice is nothing to do with morality at all.
Good. That means nothing prevents you now from paying attention to be more considerate, respectful, amicable and inclusive of the consequences of your actions on other people, in order that genuine happiness can flourish.
It’s fun.
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Vineeto: What you are still to experientially comprehend is that for Geoffrey “enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive just made sense. It was never an ‘effort’ for me. And it didn’t require a ‘commitment’. It just made sense.” (link) [Emphasis by Syd].
Syd: Yes. This is at the forefront of my mind, above all else.
Most people do require a sincere commitment at the start because it not always makes sense at the beginning to give up sorrow and malice. There are obstacles like old habits and attitudes (such as apparent your correspondence with Andrew (link)) to overcome, or there are certain concepts and belief to investigate (such as “morality”) or simply a natural obstinacy against changing human nature. Hence a clear dedication to the new aim is immensely useful. Once you overcome these various initial humps it gets easier and easier to come back each time to the wide and wondrous path of felicity, appreciation and common sense.
Geoffrey himself recommended such a commitment when asked –
Ian: Is the above commentary regarding the doorway something that is perhaps a hindsight only perspective or is there another way to be looking (from a feeling-being perspective) that you can offer a feeling-being (you now being free with that insight being now obvious to you).
Geoffrey: As long as you find yourself looking for the door that is tiny (the recipe, the formula, the secret sauce, the psychic gun, the pill, the trick), you’re nowhere near and should instead walk the path.
As long as you find the path narrow, arduous, vanishing, confusing, instead of wide and wondrous as it is, you’re not walking it, you are merely lost in the woods nearby – and should instead find it in yourself to take a first clear step in the right direction, such as making a commitment to happiness and harmlessness.
The door is wide as the universe, just as the path is by imitation.
When one knows what it is one wants, and when one knows what it is one must sacrifice, then only the sensible action remains. [Emphasis added]. (link)
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Syd: Okay, so sincerity = staying true to the facts. I get it. That’s enough for me for now.
Vineeto: For your compass to ever change its needle from your present ‘point North’ (your affectively perceived facts) you will need to comprehend, with the whole of your ‘being’, that ‘I’ am the problem, ‘I’ stand in the way of peace-on-earth and in the way of actuality becoming apparent – only then will you see the sense in doing whatever you can to act with a self-less inclination rather than in a ‘self’-enhancing way.
Syd: Here, are you enticing me to self-immolate, like, today? Because I don’t think I’m ready yet. As you know, I’m not yet fully ready to give up on (some) ‘good’ feelings (even though the compulsion has started weakening). This needs some more looking into, and thus time, if I’m to comprehend “with the whole of [my] ‘being’”.
No, that was not my intention. You snipped out the explanatory quote from Richard with the words “self-less inclination” – perhaps the reference was too subtle for you.
Richard: A general rule of thumb is: if it is a preference it is a self-less inclination; if it is an urge it is a self-centred desire. (Richard, AF List, 25d, 14 Jan 2004)
To spell it out – I suggested, as before, to put everything on a preference basis.
Syd: You also wrote that my comment on “a quality of ‘innocence’” is a “theoretical contemplation”, but this is not true as I did not describe it outside of an ongoing experience of such quality (the straightforwardness of acknowledging the facts of the matter). But again, I need time to comprehensively look into all these feelings standing in the way. The compass is still stuck on some ‘good’ feelings (and thus ‘bad’ feelings, cf. Richard on ‘addiction’ to James). Presently, I’m applying dollops of sincerity (including experiencing how “I” am those feelings), along with the intent to be genuinely happy (à la the ‘happiness’ aspect; link), wherever I can in order to glean the facts of the situation so as to patiently dislodge the stuckness …
To start with the first sentence of your previous post –
Syd: I can see that a quality of ‘innocence’, as in “lack of guile [i.e., sly or cunning intelligence] or corruption; purity”, by definition naturally exists in being sincere.
Can you see that you wrote ‘innocence’ in scare-quotes and then equated it (“by definition”) with being sincere?
There would be no need for Richard to use a different word, if innocence and sincerity were the same, wouldn’t there? And there would be no need for you to put the word in scare-quotes, as one puts ‘I’ in scare quotes to refer to the purity-corrupting identity, if you weren’t somewhat aware, somewhere in the back of your mind, that you are indeed perverting and cheapening the meaning of the purity of innocence, thereby brushing aside what Richard said – “innocence is entirely new to human history”. (Richard, AF List, No. 74, 5 Sep 2004).
It is pertinent to understand that innocence does not, and never has, “by definition naturally [existed] in being sincere”? In your tendency to make descriptions of an actual freedom your own as an identity, sincerity goes out the window.
For emphasis – ‘you’ can never ever enter actuality where nothing dirty can get in. What ‘you’ presently do instead is diminish it, cheapen it, corrupt it, in order that it may be possible for ‘you’ to achieve it. For actuality to become apparent ‘you’ will have to disappear, and there will never ever be innocence either in scare-quotes or “by definition” for ‘you’ – the instinctual-passional entity which is rotten to the core.
It would be advisable to develop some sensitivity and nuanced way of thinking and acting, taking note of the differences in the words and the reason why Richard was so particularly careful in his descriptions. Such sensitivity as in general consideration, tact and delicacy, respect, discernment (outside your accustomed, automatically ‘self’-centric way of thinking) can stand you in good stead on the way to becoming more harmless.
I like to make one more point while on the subject of sensitivity, consideration and respect – when you copy a 1000+ word text from Geoffrey and publish it on the forum for everyone’s benefit, please do not alter the text and manipulate the first impression for people by yellow-highlighting your own personal preference. It is neither considerate nor respectful to both Geoffrey and the readers.
If you post a quote because you have a personal insight or comment, write it underneath.
It’s akin to selling someone a second-hand book with the text already underlined by the previous owner, interfering with the reader gaining a first clean impression now influenced by the preferences of the previous owner. This is even more important with a report from an actually free person to maintain the purity of the original reporting from the actual world, which is generally not experienced by feeling beings and therefore can give them valuable insight when they read it with their whole ‘being’ which allows the possibility that this could happen –
Richard: When one first becomes aware of something there is a fleeting instant of pure perception of sensum, just before one affectively identifies with all the feeling memories associated with its qualia (the qualities pertaining to the properties of the form) and also before one cognitively recognises the percept (the mental product or result of perception), and this ‘raw sense-datum’ stage of sensational perception is a direct experience of the actual. Pure perception is at that instant where one converges one’s eyes or ears or nose or tongue or skin on the thing. It is that moment just before one focuses one’s feeling-memory on the object. (Richard, Attentiveness, Sensuousness, Apperceptiveness)
Syd: This ‘innocence’ is not a feeling (as in, “Whoa, look at me, I’m such an innocent angel”) or a moral-feel-good-ism, but a simple matter-of-fact quality of how “I” can approach everything perceived or felt.
The word ‘sincere’ will do just fine for this experience – genuine sincerity is void of ego-enhancing pride else it is not sincerity. It is also genuine attentiveness as defined in Richard’s above quoted article.
Syd: ‘I’ am also naturally cunning, however, so allowing this quality naturally involves recognizing and ceasing all those should-nots, can-nots, will-nots, etc. inasmuch as they mask the simple facts of the situation. (link)
Exactly. It involves all the tricks ‘I’ get up to in order so that ‘I’ can remain in situ. Therefore I made you aware that when you put innocence in scare quotes it is a watering-down process, perverting the purity of the meaning of innocence (as in “entirely new to human history”).
Syd: Also, the ‘bind’ makes sense for instinctual passions. It worked for panic, back in December. Neither repressing nor expressing (of which there are innumerable cunning forms) works with any instinctual passion, to weaken them. (link)
Vineeto: Just to make it clear, actualism is not a materialistic, therapeutically ‘self’-healing technique.
Syd: I’ve read the whole sequence from July 13 2004 to July 15 2004a and still I’m unable to comprehend how neither repressing nor expressing strong passions (via, for instance, the innumerable cunning expressions thereof) can be considered materialistic or therapeutic. (link)
When I wrote this I was under the misapprehension, which you clarified at the beginning of this post, that harmlessness was not yet part of your intent, having labelled it ‘moralistic’. Without the sincere intent to apply the actualism method as intended (feeling good being both happy and harmless), just picking some techniques from it would only be a materialistic, therapeutically ‘self’-healing technique.
Cheers Vineeto
As you know, I’m not yet fully ready to give up on (some) ‘good’ feelings (even though the compulsion has started weakening). This needs some more looking into, and thus time, if I’m to comprehend “with the whole of [my] ‘being’”.