Vineeto: I say deceivingly deliberately because just a day before (16 Feb 2026) you were not aware that ‘good’ feelings such as lust (which are as harmful and ‘self’-enhancing as ‘bad’ feelings) are not part of ‘feeling good’, and Claudiu explained it to you in a brilliant post[Upload failed]. So your own understanding of the Actualism method and therefore your personal emphases are still developing and hence your no-comment emphases misleading.
Perhaps you are personally content to only get back to feeling good, but please do not promote it as the entire actualism method. What’s the word? Reductionism?
Syd: Thanks for the replies!
Yes, my understanding of all this is “still developing”. I’ve read all of the 11 references in the ‘sincerity’ catalogue.
Hi Syd,
Let me spell out what has become clear so far regarding your “still developing” “understanding of all this” –
• You like the aim of feeling good. You emphasised it by highlighting this phrase in the various actualists’ quotes you presented. Here is what you wrote in the second post today –
Syd: Feeling good, the earthly-cum-still feeling about being here (rather than somewhen/ somewhere else), is quite enjoyable to me. I have not made up my mind, one way or the other, as to whether I can get complacent about it all and stop going further. I remember Richard’s “bester” quote, and ‘uplevelling’ one’s baseline. Why would I not uplevel my baseline? Why would I, eventually, not want to get as close to the PCE as possible? We shall see.
Feeling good 24x7 is already rather radical to contemplate and actually succeed at being.
• Even though you have acknowledged that Richard treats feeling good equivalent with ‘felicitous/ innocuous feeling’ you have not yet explicitly extended your own aim from feeling good (including hedonically pleasant feelings, i.e. ‘good feelings’) to being harmless and happy.
• In fact, you have several times pointed out that for you that would be something moralistic and therefore out of the question.
Syd: By the way, FWIW, Richard has often written words implying that actualism method == feeling good, for example (though here he also treats ‘feeling good’ and ‘felicitous/ innocuous feeling’ equivalently!): (…)
Now, one can regard one’s intent as a compass to determine one’s present aims in life. As such, your compass is firmly set on feeling good (as defined above) and therefore you automatically assess everything according to that compass setting. Hence you can’t see the benefit, both personally or for others, in pursuing that aim of becoming harmless (it would be moralistic).
Syd: Re: commentary regarding the original post – I thought it was interesting how for ‘Geoffrey’ (especially in hindsight, after becoming newly free) it amounted to enjoying & appreciating. He didn’t even explicitly consider ‘out from control VF’ for instance. I also took particular note of how for ‘him’ there was no ‘morality’ or ‘pressure’ or ‘effort’ (even an explicit ‘commitment’) and it was all easy and ‘natural’ (quite probably because of PCEs, via his “the correct application of the [actualism] method was through the ‘naive remembrance’/the ‘presentiation’ of the PCE” characterization of the actualism method). (link)
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)
Because your compass is presently set on ‘feeling good’ (including hedonically pleasant ‘good feelings’), being or becoming harmless does not make sense to you. ‘You’, the instinctual-social identity, consider it a moralistic restriction put on you.
You said in your post regarding sincerity –
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. (…)
Until your present (compass) setting changes by you further developing to understand what makes sense in a wider, less ‘self’-centric way, there is no way any theoretical contemplation on the “quality of ‘innocence” or “being naiveté”. This won’t be anything other than conjecture and imagination. You will only end up fiddling with the words and the method [i.e. appropriate actualists’ words for the purpose of self-presentation] in order to fit your present (compass) orientation (such as to put scare-quotes on innocence, thereby pollute what it means in the attempt of making it something ‘you’ the identity could achieve. It isn’t –
Richard: To put that another way: the pristine perfection of the peerless purity of this actual world is impeccable (nothing ‘dirty’, so to speak, can get in) … innocence is entirely new to human history. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, AF List, No. 74, 5 Sep 2004).
Syd: Okay, so sincerity = staying true to the facts. I get it. That’s enough for me for now. (link)
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.
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)
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)
Just to make it clear, actualism is not a materialistic, therapeutically ‘self’-healing technique. Perhaps the following two quotes help you understand –
Richard: To paraphrase/ plagiarise: both materialism (aka western dualism) and spiritualism (aka eastern non-dualism) miss something essential; they have seen and scrutinised what has happened, and in each their own way how it has happened (movingly expressed in trillions of words), but they are shutting their eyes to this which makes human life possible, this which is here to be lived now.
Which means that there is no fundamental significance in regards to people, things and events if humans miss the actuality of this moment in eternal time at this place in infinite space whilst being the particular form perpetual matter is organising itself as; for such people remain embedded in either the huge surface crust of everyday reality or the massive subterranean core of Divine Reality.
In actuality it is the magic of the perfection of the purity of the infinitude this physical universe actually is that peoples are unwittingly trying to analyse or subjectify; only when a person eliminates the human condition in its entirety can the factual significance of life, the universe and what it is to be a human being living in the world as-it-is with people as-they-are, be directly experienced and thus intimately known.
This experiential understanding is beyond anyone’s wildest dreams and schemes. (Richard, AF List, To the List at Large, 10 Apr 2001).
Respondent: OK Richard, could you just answer the only question I was really asking in the first place which is: this is the MAIN question I have here that you did not answer.
Richard: I did answer your question. Viz.:
• [Respondent]: ‘I’m sorry, being selfless cannot answer a complex ethical situation with multiple parties where some of the parties happiness must be sacrificed because of limited resources.
• [Richard]: ‘Being ‘self’-less in toto renders any ‘complex ethical situation’ (and any complex ethi[Upload failed]al solution) [Upload failed]ull and void.[Upload failed] (Richard, AF List, No. 68, 13 Jul 2004a).
Just because it is (presumably) not the answer you expected/ wanted/ whatever does not mean that I did not answer it.
Respondent: Maybe, I’m not writing well.
Richard: You have been abundantly clear all along … and you are not the first to have taken the report/ description/ explanation of life here in this actual world and endeavoured to turn it into, and/or relate it to, ethicalistic/ moralistic principles and/or values and/or virtues and/or standards and/or models and/or systems and/or conventions and/or norms and/or mores and/or maxims and/or axioms and/or postulates and/or dictums and/or directives and/or tenets and/or doctrines and/or policies and/or codes and/or canons and/or rules and/or regulations and/or laws, and so on, and you probably will not be the last. (Richard, AF List, No. 68, 15 Jul 2004a).
In fact, the whole sequence from July 13 2004 to July 15 2004a is worth reading because the respondent’s questions encompass what represent for him the values of materialism.
Cheers Vineeto