One of my favourite shows growing up was re-runs of M.A.S.H, with its famous opening theme song, that turned out to be an instrumental version of a song called “suicide is painless”.
Some have said, or written, that nothing really changes until one is in a crisis.
This has been very true for me. Something Vineeto wrote really stuck with me, and that is “we have the drama we have to have, until we have had enough”.
Another very apt saying i read somewhere was “a psychic swims in the waters a neurotic drowns in”.
In simplier terms, there is a skill acquired when one goes through enough in life and isn’t dead; suicide, death, and the end of it all becomes a background that doesn’t seem such a big deal anymore.
We had this discussion once, that feeling suicidal at sime point, was par for the course in this whole endeavour of fundamental change.
I feel the grip i had on being ‘sane’, which i thought was a given, beginning to shift towards the absurdity of suicide. The shear stupidity of dying without having lived, is somehow the only reason that trying makes any sense.
Surely, nothing could save me anyway. Why not go for what is on offer?
@jamesjjoo no need to worry James, though i appreciate the concern.
There is something about going through despair which i need to “complete the circle” with.
Words are quite cumbersome when trying to explain the psychic maze.
I remember reading in Richard’s journal, about how hard it is to pin down ‘me’.
There is a radical honesty required, a preparedness to really go where i dare not. And once there, to cry, laugh and go again.
When i wrote last night, i was crying and laughing about something that had triggered me. It was both the drama i hve been having since i was a kid, but also something new.
Which is what i meant by quoting the “psychic swims in the water a neurotic drowns in”.
I am going to go for a walk now. Just to see what it is that keeps me so stubbornly me.
Something about asking questions without thinking them through.
Hey @Andrew just a few points that came to mind reading this, let me know if it is not really applicable in your case but it seems worth mentioning.
There is a potential danger of turning this swimming in psychic waters into a value and then coming to venerate its suffering, then ultimately going around in circles of sorrow. It seems to me the psychic might have an interest in doing that, in forever charting those waters as if this has value/meaning in its own right when it does not.
As Richard writes the only good thing about suffering is when it ends, so I think with Actualism there is definitely a need to go deep sea diving at some points but it is a means to an end only. The end being freedom from those psychic influences.
To an extent ‘I’ am enormously invested in the dramas and in their continuance because it is what sustains ‘me’.
And being as cunning as ‘I’ am it is likely that ‘I’ will remain swimming in those waters because that is where ‘my’ security is, especially if it is something I become adept at.
This is something I have been realising in myself lately, that at some point the drama has to end, and do I have a vested interest in the drama going on indefinitely? For me the answer has been a yes and seeing this in operation in myself has been very eye opening. Seeing just how much ‘I’ am addicted to suffering, ‘I’ am not such a victim after all, ‘I’ actively feed my own drama so that ‘I’ have a reason to continue ‘being’.
I think this is the value of having a connection with pure intent / PCE rememoration, that it reminds us that ‘wandering psychic tunnels,’ while potentially useful, is not the end. Vineeto has a quote where she talks about wandering in her own head, Peter says something and she pops out of it into perfection… a reminder of the great distance between the actual and the psychic.
At the same time, speaking for myself, psychic explorations have been very useful for understanding all manner of things, all manner of ‘me.’ I think the main thing is it’s each individual’s exploration… I would challenge you @Andrew by asking yourself how strong your connection to pure intent is
What had started off one evening as ‘a roaming in the vast chambers of my mind’, psychic experiences and an expanded state of consciousness suddenly took a turn from ‘inner reality’ to actuality. It happened when Peter looked at me and said ‘hello, how are you doing?’ I popped out of my inner world of feelings and imagination and, questioning the very validity of all I felt and thought, entered the world beyond beliefs and feelings – the actual world. Here was another human being, a flesh-and-blood person without any particular identity and he wanted to talk to me. And here I was, also a flesh-and-blood person without a particular identity, sitting on an old couch and curious to talk to this man that I was meeting for the first time.
I had never met the actual Peter; I had only related to him through the curtain of my expectations and classifications, through the filter of my social identity, through the grey or rose-coloured glasses of my ‘self’. What was initially a shocking surprise quickly turned into fascination and delight to have discovered something so simple and so pure – actual intimacy with another person and the perfection of the actual world. Here we were, two human beings, meeting for the first time, without past or future. No grand feelings, in fact, no feelings at all, but the pleasure of mutual undivided attention as to what the other is going to say next…
All my churning questions from the weeks before as to what was right and what was wrong had disappeared from my tortured head and heart; the experience of the moment was all that mattered. In the course of the evening and the following night, insight upon insight occurred as the edifice of my beliefs system tumbled – the actual world, the world beyond belief opened up. Unbeknown to me it had been here all the time, a world where everything was simply obvious, perfect, pure, delightful, actual, factual and ‘wysiwyg’ (what you see is what you get). No deeper meaning, no God, no soul, no philosophy – meaning and significance abounds when living this moment without the burden of the ‘self’.
This pure consciousness experience became my reference point for what I wanted to achieve. It was also an essential reference point to understand what Richard was saying and writing. After all, this actual world is the very world he is living in all the time, and my PCE had just demonstrated how this world is usually tucked away behind the normal/spiritual worldview. Vineeto
What i meant was when a question is almost spontaneously ‘there’ and there is a curiosity about that question. I have never really done much of that, if any, so the “what am i waiting for?” question, was both something that naturally came up (i didn’t read something here or the AFT, or anywhere else and try and apply it… That a recall), and was interesting in itself. Obviously, i know about such questions, and the advice not to come up with intellectual answers (such a question "what am i putting out? What am i to others? " was the question Richard asked for the time before becoming free in that abandoned cow paddock).
