@henryyyyyyyyyy There’s a few things… I haven’t been able to fully read everything in your journal up to the present day but this is what I saw around where this topic came up.
You have got it right here that these emotions are the jealousy-possession-love bundle.
Here it’s clear that by “sweetness” you are referring to the ‘good’ part of the jealousy-possession-bundle, namely, the loving and affectionate feelings, as opposed to the ‘bad’ part of it, namely, the jealous and possessive ones.
When the ‘good’ feelings are threatened, you very much “VERY DON’T” like it, hence the jealous and possessive part of the bundle (which is necessary to keep the ‘good’ part of the bundle alive) comes into play.
This is very percipient and it’s well worth keeping this in mind. As when you aren’t experiencing the ‘good’ feelings it seems all you want is to be with the person, i.e. experience the ‘good’ feelings again. But then once you have that person, you just start desiring moving on to the next person - i.e. via accommodation and habituation the ‘good’ feelings with one person become lessened and then you seek to experience the elation again, which another person will trigger for you.
Just like a drug - because it is a drug! It’s just one that your body can produce on its own. But it’s the same exact addiction, reward, habituation, pathways.
Isn’t it so clear this is the result of evolution in action? The effect of this is to have you mate with one person, and then mate with another as soon as you mated with the one person, repeated ad infinitum, so as to best increase the chances of your genes surviving.
Here I’ve replaced ‘sweetness’ with how you were using the word before to make it clear that this doesn’t make sense.
Firstly the loving and affectionate feelings can never be truly unconditional… and secondly, attempting to feel them more even in any “non-partner situation”, won’t ever lead to a PCE.
Isn’t it clear looking back on those PCEs that there were no loving and affectionate feelings experienced at the time at all?
You aren’t the first to try and make the loving and affectionate feelings unconditional, nor will you be the last. This is touted by society as the solution to all the world’s problems. Yet if it really worked it would have worked by now, millenia later. So it’s clear something else is needed
Not quite… It is true that the loving and affectionate feelings arise from a union of your ‘self’ with her ‘self’. But the result of this is not no selves or selves in abeyance. It is a unified ‘self’. Two selves form a union which is still an identity. Further the union is only an illusory one. You feel as if you are united with her, but in fact you are still a separative self, albeit feeling (temporarily) unified. And the unified ‘self’ is still separated from actuality.
The best you can do via this route is become fully Enlightened like Richard did, to be that very love, unconditionally (at least it is felt to be unconditional). Yet we already know that that doesn’t work - Richard found it wanting and moved on to an eventual actual freedom. So you don’t have to repeat the experiment.
Firstly, with this firmly in mind (i.e. that what you understand as “sweetness” is actually love and affection and not what that word refers to on the Actual Freedom Trust website) I’d recommend reading (or re-reading) everything on the site about love, naivete, excellence experiences, intimacy experiences, and intimacy.
I’ll put a few paragraphs for ‘spacing’ to indicate, via text, the reading of these topics.
There is a lot to read about, after all.
The Actual Freedom Trust website has words, so many words.
Yet aren’t they so delightful?
For example, when feeling-being Richard was virtually free, his at-first naively intimate experiences, were increasingly overshadowed by love, due to a lack of precedence:
In the same way that excellence experiences (EE’s) were a notable feature of feeling-being ‘Richard’s virtual freedom experiencing circa March-September 1981, although of course not named as such back then, so too did intimacy experiences (IE’s) play a similarly significant role even though increasingly overshadowed by the insistent emergence of love – and, especially, Love Agapé – in the later months due to a marked lack of precedence and, thus, of any praxeological publications (nowadays made freely available on The Actual Freedom Trust web site) on the distinction betwixt the near-innocent intimacy of naïveté and the affectional intimacy of romance lore and legend. [Selected Correspondence: Naivete]
Now you have the web site so you can read all about this vital distinction here .
In any case…
Now that you’ve read all that, what I can share from my experience is that the sweet and incredible near-innocent intimacy of naivete, is of a completely different nature and character than the affectionate intimacy of love and romance.
It is completely non-sticky. There is no weight to it. There is no pretense to it. There is a marked simplicity to it. There’s no deception or belief or faith in it. It is not conditional. It doesn’t depend upon the other person at all. It doesn’t depend upon a promise of a forever-together future. It doesn’t involve the future at all. The past also makes no appearance in it.
There are no conditions to it. And there is no pretense of there-are-no-conditions-but-really-there-are. You don’t have your ‘hooks’ in the other person, and they don’t have theirs in you.
There is an intrinsic enjoyment to it. It’s not heady in any way. It is light and carefree. It is rich and vibrant. It is of the very senses. Senses become rich and can sort of “turn in on themselves” to become even richer. There’s a purity and bursts of color you can experience that you didn’t think were possible.
It is magical, yet not sublime. It is of-this-earth. It is an actuality. It needs no striving for it, all you have to do is get out of the way for it to happen.
There is no dissolution into another person, or them into you. You stand on your own, not together, yet you experience the intimacy of two autonomous human beings choosing to spend their time with one another. There are no problems between you two. This is no ‘force that can overcome any problem’ – there simply can’t be any problem, that will spoil it, because it will be unaffected by problems (although ‘my’ relation to and reaction to those problems certainly will!!)
It is not a force at all. There is no power to it. It is not a power that can move mountains or bind nations. Rather, it comes from a relative absence of ‘me’.
When fully out of the way, there is actual intimacy. There is no ‘me’ and no ‘other’ - yet there is no ‘union’ or ‘dissolution’ either. Rather, that which could form a union, is absent in the first place. And as that which can form the union, is what the separation in the first place actually was, there is no need for a union anymore. Love and affection are redundant – there is simply “no room” for them, actually they would even spoil it.
It leads directly to a PCE and to actuality, via less of ‘me’, as opposed to directly towards love and bliss and unity and an ASC, via less of small-me (ego) but more of big-me (soul).
Naive intimacy and affectionate intimacy are impossible to combine. Naive intimacy immediately cuts the feet out of and saps the power source of love, while love instantly covers-over and spoils naive intimacy.
You have to make a choice. What choice will you make?