This moment has no duration

Journals
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  1. Has anyone made that the central tenant of eaatomoba?
  2. Is there anyone who isn’t convinced that this moment has no duration?
  3. Is there anyone who has a “yea but so what?” response, whether emotional or intellectual, to it?
  4. Is there anyone who has routinely seenthat this moment has no duration but focuses on allowing yourself to be happy and/or investigation instead?

My answers.

  1. I have.
  2. I’m convinced.
  3. I’ve settled on what I think is the best answer to “why is the fact that it’s always now highlighted in the AFT and by Richard personally?”. And that is, because, now (as well as here-and-there) is the common denominator for every single experience ever and always. Wonder and satisfaction become the major flavor of each experience and all the various insecurities become the minor flavor during the same experience. The two can still exists side by side but wonder and satisfaction are felt more strongly. And this can be expected throughout life. Wonder and satisfaction will forever be the dominant theme no matter the circumstances.
    I think the most common answer to “now” is that if you recognize that this is the only moment you can actually be alive then you recognize the urgency to feel good independent of conditions. That is true. But it doesn’t solve the how one allows feeling good to happen.
  4. Focusing on feelings seems to take away from recognizing that time has no duration. Moreover, when I recognize that it is now, feelings become secondary. The energy is better spent seeing how it is always now. (And one is always here)
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I think it’s a little bit self-defining because right here / right now is where everything is happening, always, so when we ‘wander off’ somewhere else it’s generally because of emotional reasons… all the different aspects are essential, the right here/right now one might just be one of the most obvious aspects to us / most instructive.

So then regardless of which aspect you’re looking at, you’ll arrive at ‘this moment has no duration,’ you’ll arrive at delight, you’ll arrive at harmless - provided, of course, that love & compassion don’t get their claws into you :grin:

edit:

I’m reminded of a phrase that I think Vineeto uses, which is that the actual is the stillness that supports everything from underneath.

It’s always here, it’s always right now, it’s ‘me,’ ‘humanity,’ that’s working overtime to keep blocking it. Anyway don’t forget about the enjoyment/appreciation aspects, I spent a long time wandering in like ‘actualist materialism’ because I (personally) was hyperfixated on ‘now,’ ‘materiality’ and I missed the magic of it if that makes sense.

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If you arrive at “this moment has no duration” from any other aspect then ‘now is still as now as it was then’ then you have taken the long way to get there.

Doesn’t the enjoyment/appreciation come from stillness? Is not stillness, the immobility of time?

BTW, i don’t necessarily think that ‘time has no duration’, ‘stillness’, ‘eternity’ are the only ways to describe the same phenomenon. I think saying the universe isn’t a system but contains an infinite number of systems is to say the same thing as ‘time has no duration.’ As is that the universe has always been here and always will be here.

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My stance is essentially that Richard is the first person to ever become free, he used haietmoba / enjoying+appreciating to get there, and every other person who has become free has also used enjoying+appreciating (likely with some individual flavor/path) as well.

So, the actual is just there, it has all these different attributes:

[Richard]: ‘The fundament characteristic, or nature, of the universe is its infinitude – specifically having the properties of being spatially infinite and temporally eternal and materially perdurable – or, to put that another way, its absoluteness … as such it is a veritable perpetuus mobilis (as in being self-existent/ non-dependent and/ or self-reliant/ non-contingent and/ or self-sufficient/ unconditional and/or self-generating/ unsupported).
Having no other/ no opposite this infinitude and/or absoluteness has the property of being without compare/ incomparable, as in peerless/ matchless, and is thus perfect (complete-in-itself, consummate, ultimate).
And this is truly wonderful to behold.
Being perfect this infinitude and/or absoluteness has the qualities (qualia are intrinsic to properties) of being flawless/ faultless, as in impeccable/ immaculate, and is thus pure/ pristine.
And which is indubitably a marvellous state of affairs.
Inherent to such perfection, such purity, are the values (properties plus qualities equals values) of benignity – ‘of a thing: favourable, propitious, salutary’ (Oxford Dictionary) – and benevolence (as in being well-disposed, beneficent, bounteous, and so on) … and which are values in the sense of ‘the quality of a thing considered in respect of its ability to serve a specified purpose or cause an effect’

And as you’re saying ‘this moment has no duration’ is a common denominator for every single experience & always, but all the other attributes listed above are also key attributes of actuality, so any one of them can be used as an entry point:

-infinitude (which must be experienced, it’s not abstract)
-absoluteness
-flawless/ faultless
-benignity
-benevolence

Additionally:

It is essential for success to grasp the fact that this is one’s only moment of being alive. The past, although it did happen, is not actual now. The future, though it will happen, is not actual now. Only now is actual.

So we could add:

-Time has no duration

And:

as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is … and one is the experiencing of what is happening.

-Magicality
-Paradaisicality

So with all these different attributes, why is it that enjoying/appreciating / ‘being’ happy + harmless works so well?

I think it’s because that’s the only thing that gets ‘me’ out of here. Any other route & ‘me’ finds a way to transmute into something else. My own experience has been of ‘me’ shape-shifting over & over to stay alive.

Not that investigating any & everything isn’t extremely useful. I’m just of the opinion that there’s a reason that the method is what it is, and that Richard was the first free person, and that there are so few free people at this time.

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Are you saying that enjoyment/appreciation can come from aspects other than stillness: It can come from absoluteness as well?

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The enjoyment & appreciation leads to the door/experiencing of all these different aspects… stillness, absoluteness, perfection, benevolence etc etc are all wrapped up at once as this universe, all the time.

The only reason we’re not experiencing this directly all the time is ‘me,’ aka the passionately-generated being with an ego layered on top.

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Interesting. You see it as enjoyment leads to the experience of infinitude?

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Enjoyment/appreciation (these are subtly different things btw) are the thinnest ‘I’ can be, the thinner I am the closer I am to experiencing infinitude:

“Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is … and one is the experiencing of what is happening.”

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Ok. That quote is apt for your pov. I actually didn’t include ‘appreciation’ on purpose. Because i don’t see how you can appreciate without a sense of infinitude. So how does appreciation work without infinitude already being sensed?

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The method is about using my normal humanness to become free of normal humanness. Eg I use ‘my’ desire by redirecting it toward the productive desire to become free, I use ‘my’ appreciation by appreciating everything to the fullest extent I can each moment again. Those are all my emotions.

Then any additional help via Pure intent:

One can bring about a benediction from that perfection and purity which is the essential character of the universe by contacting and cultivating one’s original state of naiveté. Naiveté is that intimate aspect of oneself that is the nearest approximation that one can have of actual innocence – there is no innocence so long as there is a rudimentary self – and constant awareness of naive intimacy results in a continuing benediction. This blessing allows a connection to be made between oneself and the perfection and purity as is evidenced in a PCE.

Increasingly accelerates the progress until one starts to wonder, “am I really driving what’s happening?”

It’s interesting because the universe is always there, every step of the way, but because ‘I’ start with ‘me’ then I have to use ‘me’ to get things going.

Maybe a good metaphor would be if your car engine has died, you can get it going by spraying some flammable aerosol into the intake manifold to really goose it, and then once the engine gets going it’s going on its own.

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I was just asking what one appreciates if one doesn’t yet sense infinitude?

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It doesn’t matter what you appreciate, but that you’re in the state of appreciating :grin:

You can appreciate the rain falling outside, the sensation of your fingers typing, a refreshing glass of water. It literally doesn’t matter, because ultimately that sense of appreciation will put you in touch with the infinitude. It is only a matter of time & a certain amount of ‘trying’.

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Then what is the difference between enjoyment and appreciation?

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Vineeto broke it down for me as enjoyment is more the momentary aspect of now-existing, where appreciation is a bit more contextual eg: I’m appreciative that this lovely forum has been set up that I can chat with other actualists on! Maybe it involves a bit more thought, reflection.

I suppose one could enjoy the action of appreciating, and likewise appreciate the action of enjoying!

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Ok. so you don’t have to be appreciating the vast stillness to be appreciating. One can appreciate the nature of any particular ongoing thing. I don’t think I agree with that.

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Any particular thing is an expression of the vast stillness - your experiencing is your experiencing from your perspective of the vast stillness. It’s just a question of if you’re experiencing that vast stillness, or if you’re worried about something someone said yesterday or whatever.

It matters not if you’re playing water polo, or feeding the dogs, or picking at your toenails.

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The key is that any appreciation, any enjoyment, has the flavor that is the closest to purity, perfection, and all the rest. And then you can ‘pop over’ to perfection, infinitude, etc. and eventually fully drop ‘yourself.’

The method is imitative in that ‘I’ am doing the closest imitation ‘I’ can do to perfection.

It feels weird I think to say that, to be ok with imitation, but Richard invented the method because he used a similar method of imitation to get good at painting. So, rather than imitating the work of other masters, now we’re imitating the perfection of the universe.

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Why not start from infinitude and then go further into it?

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What do you mean by that?

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I mean the subject matter of my post. The now-ness of now is no mere imitation. It is a direct experience of infinitude albeit with the veneer of self still filtering out a lot of it. Why not start by literally appreciating this literal moment: the moment itself. Why not start by appreciating that? First, we do have to get to it…