I have no objections to this at all. That seems to me the perfect thing to do.
Beautiful. btw, do you really live in a cabin out in the woods?
Sort of. It’s a 12’x20’ cabin in my parent’s yard, 20 miles from town. There are a lot of trees, so I suppose you could say it’s in the woods.
Wait a minute. Is it a mother in-law suite or an actual cabin? do you have privacy or can they spy on you from their window?
I built it for myself to live in, with the purpose of having the convenience & freedom afforded by not paying rent to anyone, while still maintaining my privacy & independence.
As it turns out, any obstacles to ‘my independence’ have a lot more to do with me than them lol
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That is the coolest thing I have ever heard. I want to visit.
You’re welcome to, I live in Juneau, Alaska.
One of the watershed moments for me in all this freedom stuff was that there is no ‘cookie-cutter’ life, we all depend on ourselves to work out exactly how we want to put things together. It can look like literally anything
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definitely. i’m down for a trip to alaska next season.
I’ll keep an ear out! I enjoyed wandering through this topic together.
yea. this was good
Hi Jon - if you are using Richard as a model for your approach, then Henry is in a sense correct insofar that there does not need to exist a sense of infinitude to be appreciative. Do you recall Richards’s anecdote, which Alan relayed to us on Slack, of him slipping into a PCE while observing the near-white hot flames in a kiln and becoming utterly absorbed and fascinated with the nature of heat? Or how in the ‘PCE video’ with Pamela, he affirmed that she was practicing the actualism method correctly by delighting in kitchen activities and that she should then enjoy and appreciate it [the delight of the kitchen activities]; there was no mention or prerequisite of a sense of infinitude or eternity which later in the video Pamela clearly had trouble grasping even while experiencing the PCE. From this line of reasoning, a sports fan could fulfill the criteria of the actualism method if he were to enjoy and appreciate an engrossing match on TV; likewise, a theologian could just as well access the PCE upon becoming utterly absorbed and fascinated with the nature of a ‘sacred mystery’ expressed in the texts of the theology he ascribed to.
On the other hand, and elsewhere, Richard made it a point to differentiate between “caused enjoyment” and “uncaused enjoyment”:
Richard (2014): Your initial email … clearly pinpoints the difference between a caused/ conditional enjoyment (‘I had a lot of fun tonight with friends’/ ‘all we did was sit, talk, and joke around’) and an uncaused/ unconditional enjoyment (‘the fascination that it is this moment sets in’/ ‘I am once more enjoying life’). (A caused, or conditional, enjoyment and appreciation has a beginning and an end – it is dependent upon situations and circumstances – whereas an uncaused, or unconditional, enjoyment and appreciation is perpetual, aeonian (beginingless and endless) and occurs solely by virtue of being vitally alive – being dynamically here at this particular place in infinite space at this very moment in eternal time as a sensuous, reflective flesh-and-blood body only – and thus dependent upon no one, no thing, and no event). Your follow-up email … unambiguously indicates you are indeed [quote] ‘applying the method correctly’ [endquote] … . By thus being vitally interested – with that degree of fascinated attentiveness – in this moment being the only moment ‘he’ was ever alive … ‘he’ readily developed the knack of allowing apperception to happen as it is never not this moment (as in ‘time has no duration’/ ‘time does not move’) in actuality. (The experiential knowledge that this moment is eternal – that it is never not this moment in actuality – is the key to more instances of apperceptive awareness taking place).
Mailing List 'D' Respondent No. 44
Whereas one may have gained the simplistic impression from reading the AFT site that global peace and harmony can be brought about by having fun,
Richard (2013): Put simplistically (for maximum effect): the way to bring about global peace and harmony, in our lifetimes, is by having fun.
Mailing List 'D' Respondent No. 17
the following exchange suggests that not all sources of fun, enjoyment, and appreciation align with the actualism method (Srinath back-in-the-day got dinged by Richard for enjoying the way the trees waved about in the warm summer air because his enjoyment arose from the trees waving about in the warm summer air):
(2014)
Srinath: I was riding my bike today thinking about how someone had said something to make me sad, because it reminded me of [whatever]. I tried to cheer myself up by thinking contrary thoughts. Then I yanked my head away and looked at the trees waving about in the warm summer air. They seemed gay to a point of being ridiculous. The whole world looked ridiculously gay and merry in a baffling way. The world seemed to be turning in on itself. It was stupendous!
===
Richard: Do you not see, upon a closer read-through, that although I definitively say ‘dependent upon no one, no thing, and no event’ you report how you looked at [quote] ‘the trees waving about in the warm summer air’ [endquote] which are clearly both things (‘trees’ and ‘air’) and events (‘looked at’ and ‘waving about’) by any definition of those two words? … Nothing, but nothing (no matter how unpleasant/ detrimental), can ever take away this sheer delight of being alive/being here at this very moment; one could be in … some insalubrious penitentiary somewhere otherwise utterly displeasureable without this peerless perfection … wavering one jot.
Mailing List 'D' Respondent No. 45
From the above we can surmise that if one is enjoying the activity of cooking merely because one finds cooking activities enjoyable – in contrast to finding root canals unenjoyable – then one is not practicing the actualism method. The enjoyment and appreciation that the actualism method refers to, from the above exchange, is an enjoyment and appreciation that arises regardless of whether or not something “utterly displeasureable” is occurring.
As far as being appreciative, from Richard’s standpoint, to appreciate something means to recognize, assess, or appraise its value or worth:
Richard (2016): … appreciation in the actual world has the function of qualitative appraisal …
Mailing List 'D' Respondent No. 49
AFT site (n.d.): Appreciation (n.): assessment of the true worth or value of persons or things; (n.): appreciator. [C17: from Medieval Latin appretiāre, ‘to value, prize’, from Latin pretium, ‘price’]. ~ (Collins English Dictionary).
Abditorium Am-Au
It’s a way of acknowledging or registering that something worthwhile, important, positive, beneficial, or advantageous is occurring or has occurred; which has the effect of augmenting, reinforcing, and amplifying whatever it is that one is enjoying.
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What do you mean by “actualist materialism”?
So which one is it then, Rick? Are we to be fascinated that it is this moment or can we just be delighting in doing kitchen activities without any sense of infinitiude?
No need for a sense of infinitude.
Before going on, how much of a “sense” of infinitude are you talking about?
What I experienced for quite awhile was a hyperfixation on the ‘material’ nature of the universe but I wasn’t enjoying & appreciating. This resulted in a very dull, ‘flat’ experiencing, and I stalled out insofar as becoming free went. This lasted on & off for a year or 2. It was only when I recalibrated with enjoyment & appreciation specifically in mind, with a much better understanding of actualism as a ‘mood-first,’ ‘vibe-first’ process that things started to move again. I became aware that I was going wrong when I visited Ballina in 2019.
I think the most straightforward way to resolve this dilemma is that we all have to start somewhere. Enjoy & appreciate whatever it is you personally can have success enjoying & appreciating, have a few PCEs (or a few more) to really get pure intent revving up, and then move toward uncaused enjoyment + appreciation
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I still don’t get it 
Were you trying to be ‘in the now’ and therefore fixated upon the “material” as a way to not get lost in the thoughts of future and past and therefore felt the experience was ‘dull’?
any “infinitude” you experience while not in a PCE is nothing more than imagination. so enjoying/appreciating lead to EE’s which with sufficient self-abandoning can lead to PCE’s and then glimpses of infinitude(note that several actually free people have stated that they didn’t really even began to really experience infinitude until they moved deeper into actual freedom itself).
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because this is a self based belief that is not the actual experience of infinitude
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What @actualron says here is what I was thinking about as I was following this topic…
At first I assumed that you, @JonnyPitt, had already experienced a PCE or EE, but… have you?