The meaning of the title to this post just hit me: ‘This moment has no duration.’ This is no beginning and no end to this moment. It just is.
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Sorry Claudiu, I’m not seeing it. Looks to me like a tiny little nothing burger.
Hi Jon,
Ok, as it appears you don’t have any interest in writing sincere and accurate reports, and writing insincere and inaccurate reports is “a tiny little nothing burger” to you, I will take that under consideration when reading what you wrote in the past and what you have to write in the future.
Cheers,
Claudiu
Hi Jon,
Thank you for the welcome.
@JonnyPitt: My experience of late has been rather wonderful. It may be an ASC. If I were to call a PCE foreign then that would be clue. Because that would be impossible. PCEs aren’t like that. Nor are EE’s or IEs. This I know from experience. But examining my objections while being temporarily free of my normal anxieties did lead me to a place that seemed both foreign and a lot closer to the actual world than I am normally. I thought that foreignness might be an objection a lot of us have. And I was keen on conversating about that if anyone was interested. And if not then I was happy just putting it out there. [link]
Lately there is a new kind of ASC amongst people who come across Richard’s writings which could be called actualism-mimicking-ASC.
However, experiences of unreality have been quite common within the human condition. Here is one Richard’s described and another one from Peter –
[Richard]: I have written before (on my portion of The Actual Freedom Trust website) about personally experiencing a major dissociative state, of an extended duration during a period of my life in a war-zone as a youth, which was not unlike being in the centre of a cyclone – all about raged fear and hatred, anger and aggression – and in that unreality all was calm, peaceful (and ‘fearless’). (link) (List D 12)
Peter: Another doubt that emerged about this time was that if I was to throw out spirituality could it be that I would just end up back where I had started, but without love, trust, faith and hope: the very things that made life at least bearable? Would I find myself in some bleak awfulness, some grey world, empty of everything? One day I had a flash of stark barrenness, a glimpse of stark reality – but I knew from my peak experiences that this was simply fear and, sure enough, being only fear, it did not last. (link)
Besides, your very description of the experience is rather revealing:
JonnyPitt: I just experienced actual not as something that is more real than real or Real2.0 or super real but as something that is unreal. So unreal that the word Actual seemed counter-intuitive. Actual and real being synonyms in normal conversation, I found it at odds with the world I just experienced. A synonym for real didn’t seem to convey how unreal it was […] (link)
You can’t have it both ways – either your is ‘actual’ is used synonymous with real or it is “so unreal that the word Actual seemed counter-intuitive”. Neither of these two descriptions reflect anything of the actual world. As such your very claim that this is why you have objections to an actual freedom are simply a red herring, a “nothing burger” (link).
I also look askance at your statement that “lead me to a place that seemed both foreign and a lot closer to the actual world”. It may be your subjective impression but the way you write shows no indication that you are “a lot closer to the actual world”.
JonnyPitt: Leading others astray didn’t occur to me.
You also said:
JonnyPitt: I simply lack the leverage to do that. [link]
Who are you kidding – have you forgotten the Cause of Bias thread which generated 219 posts, caused a stir and a rift in the halls of the Discuss Actualism Forum and was merely based on a strawman and a red-herring carelessly introduced but fervently defended by you?(*)
(*)[Richard]: JonnyPitt’s “Cause of Bias” thread is flawed from the get-go inasmuch his basic premiss regarding bias not being a product of ‘self’(1) is a premiss based upon calumny thence traducement (i.e., upon a strawman and a red-herring thence flat-out lies about “bad arguments” and “cognitive limitations” similar to “tone deafness” or “dyslexia” plus further lies, built upon those flat-out lies, about Richard and Vineeto being “stubbornly irrational”, and (allegedly) on the record with some “verifiably bat-shit crazy” opinions). [link](tool-tip after “flawed-from-the-get-go”).
(1)Footnote:
Cause of Bias? Message № 01; JonnyPitt; 6 Feb 2023.
What causes bias? I don’t think it’s self. What else can it be? [link].
[Richard]: Incidentally, and just in case it has escaped any casual reader’s notice, the entire “Cause of Bias” thread at the Discuss Actualism Online forum is rendered null and void by the marked absence of examples of bias from those in whom identity in toto is extinct [link]
And now you have started another red herring/nothing burger with this “unreality”=PCE. Can you comprehend that with such a history your claim of “lack of leverage” is rather unconvincing and that therefore your assertion that your “inaccurate” information would cause no harm to anyone is equally erroneous?
JonnyPitt: The actual world is pretty foreign when you’re not in it. When you still have access to all your anxieties yet see a world where those anxieties don’t exist and it’s like well i can stay here or go back – I think some interesting thoughts occur, some conversations can take place where words like unreal and foreign are bandied about. But maybe this an ASC.
Those statements are very clearly not made while in a PCE, in an EE or even when feeling good. They are made when in the grips of the ‘self’, which is “a lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning” identity –
[Richard]: Wherever there be no underestimating the extent to which a lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning feeling-being will go in order to remain affectively-psychically in existence – millions upon millions of years of blind nature’s successful perpetuation of the species via its rough-and-ready instinctual survival passions blindly dictates no other course of action can ever instinctually come about – is where there be far less likelihood of ascribing to nescience that which quite properly has its roots in the visceral wiliness of the wild which has so successfully proliferated the species thus far.
It is no-one’s fault if they be more cunning – more instinctively wily – than the norm as it is genetic inheritance which determines the degree to which instinctual drives, urges, impulses, appetites, and all the rest, are operating. [link, Footnote [1]]
Hence my previous suggestion that “it’s more fruitful to examine those fears and objections from a more dispassionate perspective, i.e. after you get back to feeling good first.” [link] and I add a suggestion to only write on the forum when you are feeling good.
JonnyPitt: An objection must remain, right? Otherwise, I’d have immolated, no?
Ha I think you fallen for James’ simplistic formula – What I had said was –
Vineeto to Claudiu: Become more and more friends with ‘me’ in that ‘I’ agree on more and more points that ‘I’ am indeed redundant to the stage where ‘I’ joyously acquiesce to lay down ‘my’ burden (it is indeed experienced as a burden) and fulfil ‘my’ deep-down yearning to finally go into oblivion.
When there is no objection left there is only joyous anticipation and no fear at all. [link]
This is when one is out-from-control, in a different way of being, in an ongoing excellence experience. Your next step is to recognize that fear is a burden, not a necessity for survival.
JonnyPitt: I think living without fear is an objection I have. I think the danger of having no fear is the objection. However, the foreignness I described has lessened. It feels more normal to have this level of reduced defensiveness, this level of reduced boredom, this level of assuredness that everything will be fine, this level of reduced responsibility and neediness. It’s still not totally normal though.
Ok, now you are getting closer to the real cause of why you introduced this thread but you are still defending the feeling that you feel. You are defending your ‘self’, the human condition. You haven’t decided yet that you want to live life without this feeling hampering you.
The way the actualism method works is to get back to feeling good before investigating any aspect of the trigger that made you feel bad.
Once you are feeling good – which may take some time to accomplish – look at the trigger (if it was an intense feeling which in your case it is) in a dispassionate way. Don’t embrace it, don’t defend it, don’t object to it, be as honest as you can, in other words, don’t feed it. When you stop feeding it, it will automatically shrink to at least half its intensity, if not more. Feelings can’t sustain themselves unless ‘I’ continue to feed it.
Then you can begin to contemplate in a rational manner, perhaps gather some information, for instance [link]. See what the fear is about – ask yourself some questions. Can you really not live /survive without it? How come other actually free people can and you think you cannot? Is fear attractive for you, does it have any endearing features (apart from being real)? Can you perhaps see that fear is there in order to keep you trapped within the human condition so that you stay as you are, that you do not have to change? Is it perhaps the fear to change? Do you want to change despite the fear? Do you want to perhaps be able to enjoy and appreciate being alive?
Btw, enjoyment and appreciation is not the same as you termed it – “wonder and satisfaction” [link]
JonnyPitt: I’m not used to thinking that everything will work out and I really don’t need to worry.
That is not what an actual freedom is about, even though it’s true that without instinctual passion is it much easier to meet the challenges that being alive presents. (See how you water down the magnificence of experiencing being pure intent personified as a flesh-and-blood human being, even the possibility to living peace-on-earth, by defining it from the myopic ‘self’-centred perspective of ‘what do ‘I’ get out of it?)
JonnyPitt” […] It’s just different thinking like that. And I think that’s still an objection. Maybe I should worry more. Ya know. If I don’t worry then christ shit might hit the fan and I won’t be prepared.
Ha, do you really think, if you worry enough those things won’t happen, and if they are happening, you will be prepared for everything? I guess you do think that, but you do so because you are not yet feeling good – life looks a lot different when you allow yourself to stop feeding the present feeling and allow a bit more naiveté to flourish. It will not automatically pay your electricity bill but you have been able to pay so far whether you worried about it or not.
Look at it this way – the universe has kept you alive and well so far, given you your skills and talents to accomplish staying alive, whether you additionally worried or not. Your ‘self’ and your feelings have not contributed, on the contrary, they have stuffed up a lot and caused a lot of unnecessary problems. ‘You’ are not needed, ‘you’ are redundant.
RICHARD: Yet all sentient beings are a product of nature. Nature endows all sentient beings with the instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire, right? You are suggesting that this nature might be better of scrapping human beings for some other ‘less aggressive’ being. Yet it was nature that made human beings aggressive in the first place. Do you see the circular nature of what you are saying?
RESPONDENT: I am not so sure. Fright is the intelligent response to danger.
RICHARD: Not so … fright is the instinctual reaction to danger [and a lot of imagined danger at that]. You are still believing that instincts are intelligent. Instincts are killing people. [link]
Cheers Vineeto
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I’m glad this topic has been brought up. @JonnyPitt I think the dichotomy you are falling for is something that I have been contemplating recently in myself.
Essentially it goes that ‘I’ either worry about things so that “I can get shit done” OR I adopt some kind of ‘don’t worry, be happy’ mentality.
The mistake is confusing the ‘don’t worry, be happy’ mentality with what actualism and actual freedom is all about.
The thing is that both options within this dichotomy are two sides of the same coin, as in whether ‘I’ choose to ‘worry and be productive’ or ‘don’t worry, be happy’, ‘I’ am still trapped in a worldview where emotion is primary, as in ‘I’ never get to see the actual situation for what it is.
‘I’ end up confusing worry with caring and happiness with lack of care. I guess this is a fundamental feature of being a ‘self’, that the actual situation is never seen and instead everything is enmeshed with emotion.
I notice in myself that once I am caught in this dichotomy I will end up coming up with all sorts of weird ‘actualist rules’ for myself, for example “I should be happy instead of thinking about X” but then again since when is feeling happy and harmless at odds with thoughtful consideration of whatever topic?
The point I am trying to get at is that once care and consideration is disentangled from both emotion and belief then it is absolutely sensible (as it always has been) to apply ones mind to whatever situation is at hand.
This is what I notice (with delight) whenever I have an EE or PCE, that I don’t stop being me, in the sense that all of a sudden the bills don’t get paid or I don’t turn up at work or I don’t go to train BJJ. It’s not as if ‘I’ go into abeyance and some alien is dropped in ‘my’ place. And the same with feeling good, I still care about the same things, I am still the same individual, it is just that now a burden has been lifted.
So when ‘I’ disappear there is no void, instead the genuine me as-I-am is discovered, of course he does not stop caring, he actually cares, whereas ‘my’ care is forever tangled up with emotion.
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Just some notes I want to write down before I go about my day. Disclaimer: At the most this is merely a conversation starter for anyone who wants to chat. At the least, it’s just the place and time I chose to jot a thing down so I don’t have to worry about remembering them.
When a particular bad feeling arises the mechanisms of dealing with it:
- Validate it: Normal
- Dwell in it: Abnormal
- Reason or distract yourself out of it: Suppression
- Notice it and allow it to go away to be replaced by a felicitous feeling. Actualist?
- Think of it as something separate from you: Detachment/dissociation
- Repression: What’s the action of repression? I can’t think of one rn. If I do I’ll come back and edit.
10 minutes later: One of the most persistent bad feelings I get is boredom. Here I am sitting in front of my computer trying to learn a thing or two that will help me with my finances and I feel boredom. Okay. No problem. Been here before. I pause from my work. Allow the boredom to pass and it’s replaced by something very good. I marvel for quite some time. And then I get back to work and by golly two minutes later boredom and repeat the whole damn thing. And now it’s time for me to get up and make some actual money but before I do that I come on here and write this…So there’s a few less minutes working/learning. lol- coming on here probably fits #3 in this case, suppression - distracting myself out of it. Oh well.
I suspect the boredom is a resentment and maybe I should proactively cultivate some felicitous whenever I sit down to work. Hopefully not in a #3 type of way reasoning myself out of it. Hopefully within felicitousness before boredom arises, I can just kind of acknowledge how good it feels to sit down and how amazing it is to type with two hands and see the words come across or how cool the thing is that I’m learning. Maybe. Not a recommendation or anything. Just something I’m gonna play with in the coming days.
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Disclaimer: Just a guy, most likely clueless and foolish - cunning, lonely and afraid - self-centered and dishonest - jotting things down.
I want to embrace the ‘wow’ moments today. I want to put them on a pedestal and see them as my reason for being alive. Maybe I’ll try to see everything else as background. It’s either what is necessary or what is leisurely but either way I want to see them as merely the stage for experiencing more and longer ‘wow’ moments.
Just jotting things down. This isn’t an exhaustive survey of everything I have to say on this subject. Nor is every word carefully chosen. And some words that were carefully chosen may have been influenced by personal preferences over a desire for clarity.
5 days ago i decided to stop doing 4 specific things. Since then I’ve had the space to recognize how those 4 things were just coping mechanisms. By not doing them i have had space to examine what i was coping with.
The 2 biggest takeaways so far have had to do with rage and boredom.
(Interestingly boredom often works to distract me from a very unpleasant buildup of rage. Funnily enough one of the 4 things boredom triggers me to do only exacerbates the built up rage.)
Having forbidden myself from my 4 main coping mechanisms, i am left with only one viable option. And that’s to minimize then examine.
After doing so, i am often left with no where to go. When working i can return to my work. But when by myself i have no where to run to. No choice but to reside somewhere more-or-less near the actual world. It is more near it when i am experiencing some part of it like sweetness or a more still, quieter atmosphere. And it is less near it when i am examining some generalized anxiety. I say generalized because i haven’t found a specific source. In both cases, i am farther away from the real world and those real concerns.
It seems those so-called real concerns are really just an accumulation of unexamined stressors. And one can drain them from the psyche before they build up.
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Things are much better. I see an urge to do one of the 4 things as an alarm bell that something is wrong and i identify the feeling, minimize it and then allow myself to feel good and then enjoy that feeling for as long as possible. Sometimes purity becomes accessible but other times an existential anxiety pushes me away from feeling good.
Lately I’ve been seeing my inner monologue as yet another way i avoid bad feelings. It works the same way those 4 bad habits work. I get the urge to restart a familiar inner monologue in order to avoid a bad feeling. However, unlike the 4 other bad habits, i find it impossible to completely stop running over the same old inner monologues. Probaby better to work on recognizing that the monologue is just a way to avoid bad feelings (boredom mostly) without trying to shut it down completely. Lots of times when I approach it like that i find myself finishing my silly and unnecessary monologue much much much more quickly than I usually finish it. And from there i can identify the anxiety that compelled me to create said monologue and either enjoy and appreciate or sit with the anxiety until i am comfortable allowing myself to feel good again.
(Just jotting things down. All the usual unspoken caveats that are freely applied in normal conversation are applicable here)
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Boy, did I have a banger of an insight last night! For one I had the most vivid experience of I am the human condition and the human condition is me I’ve had since Alan was still in Scottland or had just moved to Florida. Secondly, I saw the human condition schematically. Of course, I realize that was not actual or even real. It was just an intellectual exercise but boy was it helpful. Thirdly, I saw the human condition as being in perpetual conflict with itself and how each individual is just choosing a place within the human conflict where they most feel safe and how sides are chosen and how each side has a legitimate (or equally illegitimate) claim to being good, just, true, etc. That those concepts are entirely made-up i.e. they would have no existence, not even as practical concepts, in an actual world as I remember PCEs and can somewhat rememorate here on my keyboard and there on my mattress last night. Fourthly, how the BEST way to ascertain what is correct and practical isn’t through reason but through apperception. Fithly, how perspective would change a reasonable person’s conclusion even when the reasonable person is apperceptive. And sixthly, I think I saw how one becomes actually free. I think one sees oneself as the human condition, sees the human condition for what it is, maintains a connection to pure intent and when one is fully on board, it happens.
For the record, I’ve been derailed for the entirety of at least 7 weeks now. I allowed myself to take a day off from being actualist oriented. Went back to old destructive self-centered and lazy habits. And I never got back on track. It came to head two days ago after a trip to Chicago where I wasn’t alone for two days. And while I had a ball, I needed a reset. The reset came in the form of a 2 day depression where I eventually recognized what exactly was getting me down. I got well enough to go back to work but was largely unhappy at work. After coming home, I reflected on a major source of alienation I have with others and the insights came. I am probably leaving something out. Some of the individual insights were stronger than others and more important than others. None of these descriptions should be taken as the end all and be all of what I experienced or how I intend it to come across. As always the limits of communicaiton should be taken into account.
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Ah yes that is a good one! Do you remember when we had a video call and we discussed Richard’s and Vineeto’s views regarding Global warming? And how you found their points to be ‘weak’ in the sense of not appearing to be rationally good arguments.
We discussed this exactly, that perhaps there is something more solid than reason alone, which is as you have pointed out apperception, the ability to experience facts directly without the medium of thought or feeling.
But of course to the one listening from within the human condition this just appears as ‘weak arguments’ as all they have to go by is thought and feeling.
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Yes. That conversation and the cause of bias thread did go through my head last night. And the apopros word I either missed, or was never brought up and which I didn’t think of myself, was perspective. It was probably brought up but I didn’t see how perspective could be that powerful, because, it’s easy to change perspective if one chooses. But in the actual world, one may have no inclination to change perspective because their perspective is basically perfect for their circumstance. I’m just ball parking here. I’m saying perspective may have something to do with two reasonable people applying reason perfectly well but coming up with opposite conclusions. It was actually the least important of last nights insights but definitely a part of the whole experience.
But you are specifically referring to how apperception is more solid than reason alone. To which I saw or exeprienced last night. And that insight is hard to explain using reason. But basically it’s like reason is a nice tool but apperception is the place reason would have you go to anyways so start there and then use the tool to go further if you want. Something like that.
Another part of the experience which I failed to mention was felicity. Felicity is a part of the human condition despite it being totally innocuous. One can be felicitous while still experiencing how I am the human condition and the human condition is me. Which itself is quite felicitous, pun intended. Because, otherwise, if my theory about self-immolation is correct, one would have to feel the unhappy and harmfulness of the human condition to know one is the human condition but said malice and sorrow would then lock them up out of ascertaining and maintaining pure intent thus making self-immolation impossible.
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An obvious example of the failure of reason alone is philosophy! How such sharp intellects could accomplish so little or even cause further confusion.
The problem with reason alone is that without the grounding of fact it turns to affect to fill the gaps. In fact most people’s world views ‘make sense’ to them logically, they can string together a bunch of affective constructs in a way that seems infallible and yet as you mentioned with the right perspective it is really laughable.
Hence as Richard wrote “it is impossible to combat the wisdom of the real world”, it has been woven so intricately, with each belief having reference to another so seamlessly, the end product appearing so reasonable. And yet the PCE shows the whole lot to be incorrect.
It is fascinating that each human being has the capacity to see the cracks in this construct though. I often talk with my mum about various aspects of the ‘human constitution’ and there is usually at least 1 thing that clicks, some illusion falling away and a fact seen.
‘I’ cannot experience actuality and thus ‘I’ am precluded from actual wisdom, however ‘I’ can be naive. I have a lot of fun doing this with anything and everything really, to look at any situation or any bit of ‘human wisdom’ naively and just watch as the cracks begin to show 
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Along similar lines to what Vineeto wrote to Henry regarding preferences and what Claudiu wrote some 2 days ago regarding mortality, I experienced how the real world revolves around some climax or another. But the actual world has no climaxes. The stream of benignity and benevolence doesn’t have one. Perfection can only exist without them.
Climaxes need to exist outside time. We psychological entities are always in some relationship with a climax of some sort. Take that away and the feeling is freeing yet peculiar. One can say the climax is always ongoing. One of the great obstacles I have to moving closer to freedom is that those times when I’m closer than usual there is an onset of confusion and/or boredom as in what’s next, okay so what now. But sufficient pure intent would clear that up. It seems pure intent is utterly unhuman. And climaxes or the need for them, the need for a story with a beginning and at least one climax, is human. Pure intent isn’t human. I’d say the closest human attribute it has could be described as kindness. But the kindness of pure intent is structural even though pure intent is unbuilt. Human kindness, otoh, is a gift given from one to another. Whereas benignity and benevolence seems to exist for no purpose related to me that I can ascertain. When tapped into, it doesn’t feel like a gift. But it is the thing that makes life make sense when no story is being told. Idk, That’s all I got. Gonna go vist my dad now. He was born in 1945 and just pulled some muscles. Poor guy. It sucks getting old. Today is kind of like a holiday for people born or raised in my hometown and surroundings. Speaking of kindness, I can give him the gift of my presence. Even though the fool doesn’t deserve it. Lol. What a strange man that guy was when he was my age and younger. Now he’s old so I get to take a peek at my future. I think it’s funny how when you’re 20, you don’t realize you are looking at your future self when you see the generation that raised you. By the time your 40, you start to see it. It’s like young people can’t predict the future even when it’s playing out right in front of their eyes. I also like observing children. My gf has two of them. It’s delicious seeing how utterly ignorant they are and can’t help themselves but to be. It’s hilarious.
Good post.
Tx.
Really on point.
I appreciate that.
Way to stick to one coherent subject matter.
lol
Have a good day everyone!
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Hi @Jon,
It is indeed a good post, sticking to one coherent subject matter, as you say yourself at the end.
Jon: Good post. Tx. Really on point. I appreciate that. Way to stick to one coherent subject matter. lol
This is how productive thinking works. Great you remembered to pat yourself on the back.
When I first met Richard, after years of spiritual search where thinking was discouraged, I was delighted to be encouraged to use my brain again in the way it is capable of. Richard gave me one guideline – when exploring one topic to find out answers I hadn’t thought of before, he said, always come back to the ‘trunk’, the original question of inquiry. You can branch out, jump from branch to branch, but then come back to the original question. This way whatever has been discovered by the discursive way of thinking will be fed into advancing the original question. That’s how productive contemplation can work best.
Jon: Along similar lines to what Vineeto wrote to Henry regarding preferences and what Claudiu wrote some 2 days ago regarding mortality, I experienced how the real world revolves around some climax or another.
Here is what I pick out from your thought process – you “experienced how the real world revolves around some climax or another” , that you are always chasing some excitement (like most people), some valued goal, and when that is achieved, or not achieved, the excitement disappears.
Jon: But the actual world has no climaxes. The stream of benignity and benevolence doesn’t have one. Perfection can only exist without them. Climaxes need to exist outside time. We psychological entities are always in some relationship with a climax of some sort. Take that away and the feeling is freeing yet peculiar. One can say the climax is always ongoing.
This seems to be guesswork or a projected imagined quality rather than thinking, as you also say that “it seems pure intent is utterly unhuman”, which means you have not experienced either pure intent or “the stream of benignity and benevolence” or “perfection” – or at least can’t remember those qualities from when you experienced it. What is correct is that there is no emotional climax.
Jon: One of the great obstacles I have to moving closer to freedom is that those times when I’m closer than usual there is an onset of confusion and/or boredom as in what’s next, okay so what now.
That is a good insight. It’s akin to Claudiu’s reporting yesterday –
Claudiu: A major thing is seeing a deeply ingrained and conditioned habit of avoidance I have. I came to see its habitual, a fear of anything unfamiliar or not already unknown. But then I ask myself (hoving closer to actuality) is anything actually wrong happening? (link)
Now, if you asked yourself, “is anything actually wrong happening?” you might discover that it’s ok to feel confusion/ boredom … because it might well be a way for you to discover a glimpse of your childhood naïveté. Viz.:
Jon: I also like observing children. My gf has two of them. It’s delicious seeing how utterly ignorant they are and can’t help themselves but to be. It’s hilarious.
Naiveté starts with having fun for no reason at all, to allow yourself to feel confused, not being in line with adult seriousness, being coy, unsure, a bit like a fool and a bit like a happy child, and very alive. See if you can access this naïveté, and discover that it eventually allows you to like yourself and consequently like others too. You can even marvel at the fact of being alive with childlike sensuosity. Naïveté will make enjoying and appreciating very, very easy.
“Kindness” is a very poor substitute, more like a duty when you can feel naïve instead, and then moving to be naïve, and consequently feel more alive and more enjoy being alive. It doesn’t require one climax after another, which only leaves you empty after it’s finished. Being naïve opens your eyes to a world you have long forgotten … and you can, if you allow it, experience sincere intent and even allow a PCE to happen (where you can get a connection to pure intent).
Jon: But sufficient pure intent would clear that up. It seems pure intent is utterly unhuman. And climaxes or the need for them, the need for a story with a beginning and at least one climax, is human. Pure intent isn’t human. I’d say the closest human attribute it has could be described as kindness.
You say that “pure intent is utterly unhuman” because it is not in your human experience. But the word “intent” in this phrase is the feeling being’s sincere intent to bring about the purity one has experienced (if you could only remember it) at least one time in one’s life. The purity is of the actual world, the intent is from the feeling being wanting to (eventually) live in the actual world. [Correction: [Richard]: “pure intent, born out of the connection between one’s inherent naiveté and the perfection of the infinitude of this physical universe” - therefore wanting to live in the actual world is sincere intent, “pure intent” is that which “must be outside of the human condition”].
So now that you come this far in your contemplation, why not give naïveté a try. All you need to do is putting aside your pride and its counterpart humility (which everyone is inflicted with to the detriment of the human race). Here is what Richard said about naïveté –
Richard: Naiveté is so vital to freedom. This is because even the strictest application of moralistic and ethicalistic injunctions will never lead to the clean clarity of the purity of living the perfection of the infinitude of this material universe. Purity is an actual condition – intrinsic to this universe – that a human being can tap into by pure intent. Pure intent can be activated with earnest attention paid to the state of naiveté. To be naïve is to be virginal, unaffected, unselfconsciously artless … in short: ingenuous. Naiveté is a much-maligned word, having the common assumption that it implies gullibility. Nevertheless, to be naïve means to be simple and unsophisticated.
Pride is derived from an intellect inured to naïve innocence; to such an intellect, to be guileless appears to be gullible, stupid. In actuality, one has to be gullible to be sophisticated, to be wise in the ways of the real world. The ‘worldly-wise’ realists are not in touch with the purity of innocence; they readily obey the peremptory decrees of the cultured sophisticates. A sample of such decrees are: ‘I didn’t come down in the last shower’, or ‘I wasn’t born yesterday’, or ‘You’ve got to be tough to survive in the real world’, or ‘It’s dog eat dog out there’ … and so on. Such people are said to have ‘lost their innocence’. Human beings have not ‘lost their innocence’ … they never had it in the first place.
Innocence is something entirely new; it has never existed in human beings before. It is an evolutionary break-through to come upon innocence. It is a mutation of the human brain. Naiveté is a necessary precursor to invoke the condition of innocence. One surely has to be naïve to contemplate the profound notion that this universe is benign, friendly. One needs to be naïve to consider that this universe has an inherent imperative for well-being to flourish; that it has a built-in benevolence available to one who is artless, without guile.
To the realist – the ‘worldly-wise’ – this appears like utter foolishness. After all, life is a ‘vale of tears’ and one must ‘make the best of a bad situation’ because one ‘can’t change human nature’; and therefore ‘you have to fight for your rights’. This derogatory advice is endlessly forthcoming; the put-down of the universe goes on ad nauseam, wherever one travels throughout the world. This universe is so enormous in size – infinity being as enormous as it can get – and so magnificent in its scope – eternity being as magnificent as it can get – how on earth could anyone believe for a minute that it is all here for humans to be forever miserable and malicious in?
It is foolishness of the highest order to believe it to be impossible to be free. (Library, Topics, Naïveté)
So you see, being a fool would be the opposite of being naïve. 
Cheers Vineeto
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Oh wow what a brilliant way to describe it, I now get it completely! That is why pure intent is one’s active connection to actuality, because it comprises both the ‘human’ aspect which is the intent and the aspect of purity which is outside of ‘humanity’. And naïveté is where ‘I’ can keep this connection readily open.
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It’s funny actually cause I understood it a very different way
I understood that the term “pure intent” has been reserved specifically just for that which is actual, i.e. having nothing to do with ‘me’ and ‘my’ doings – and “intent” refers to the agency-aspect of actuality, viz.:
RICHARD: Thus, as an agent and/or an agency can be someone or *something * then, in regards ‘pure intent’ (where agency needs must be outside of the human condition), that agency-association – which association is what the word intent had, in that context, for the feeling-being in residence in this flesh-and-blood body circa January/February 1981 – definitively refers to *something * which ‘he’ described as [quote] ‘a manifest life-force, a genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity, which originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe’ [endquote]. [source]
In other words, the “intent” of “pure intent” is that which “must be outside of the human condition” – i.e. not from a “feeling being wanting to (eventually) live in the actual world”, whose intent would of course be inside of the human condition.
As I understand, the entire AFT site was searched for the word “pure intent” and it was replaced instead with “sincere intent” or “naive intent” where it was referring to a feeling-being’s intent, for clarity of communication and to maintain “pure intent” as strictly that which is actual, i.e. “a genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity, which originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe”.
And it’s particularly relevant in the context of something like Richard writing that “to be actually free from the human condition is to be that pure intent … as in, to be that benevolence and benignity as a flesh-and-blood body only” (source). Because if “intent” is a feeling-being’s intent then it would necessarily be absent when said feeling-being is absent. Yet when actually free, one is that pure intent. Therefore pure intent must be something that is actual.
It being something that is strictly actual seems odd and weird at first as feeling-beings can and do experience it, but that is how it can serve as a connection between one’s naivete and the actual world. And the agency-aspect being strictly actual as well is odd since ‘I’ as a feeling-being can clearly intend to and have agency to go towards the actual world. But it somehow works out to use it this way anyway haha.
It is strange because pure intent is both the connection (that is actual) and all that one is when actually free (which is also actual). But of course when actually free there’s no connection anymore because the feeling-being has totally self-immolated. But it’s still pure intent… and there it seems to be somewhat synonymous to the purity of the actual world.
Maybe I can put it like this: what pure intent is, is the purity of the actual world as manifest via a flesh-and-blood human body being apperceptively conscious. This purity-as-human-consciousness is all that one is when fully actually free. Further, as all that actually exists anyway are flesh-and-blood bodies being conscious, and this is happening whether a given flesh-and-blood body is actually free or not, this purity-as-consciousness exists and is happening even whilst a body is being parasitically inhabited by a feeling-being. As such, that feeling-being can allow that purity-as-consciousness to increasingly enter their sensorium, which serves as a guiding light to allow that feeling-being to increasingly let themselves let go of the reins, to experience that purity-as-consciousness more and more via increasing gradiations up to an excellence experience, then the temporary abeyance of a pure consciousness experience, and eventually a total and permanent self-immolation to allow that purity-as-consciousness to fully flourish and experience itself as that purity in and of itself, in other words to be the universe experiencing itself as a flesh-and-blood human body.
In other words: a quality of the actual universe is its purity. This purity is everywhere all-at-once. This purity manifests as purity-as-consciousness in a flesh-and-blood body being conscious. As such purity-as-consciousness can always be tapped into, and there is the experience of it being everywhere all-at-once – but what is everywhere all-at-once is, strictly speaking, the purity of actuality itself, not the purity-as-consciousness (which a flesh and blood body is basically experiencing only their own (with caveats that a ‘common consciousness’ appears to be possible)), but the purity-as-consciousness is essentially the same as the purity as it is that purity manifesting in a particular way – as consciousness, rather than say a perfectly hanging dew drop at the end of a leaf or a river perfectly flowing along its well-weathered contours.
Nothing within the human condition can ever be this purity-as-consciousness, as the human condition is not actual – but the human condition is set up to allow a feeling-being to experience it. They can and must have a sincere and naive intent to allow it to happen, and once they do they can experience this purity-as-consciousness as well. As such this naive intent is intimately related with the purity-as-consciousness, and enables it to be experienced (it is always happening but not always experienced), but it is not the same category of thing.
The questions that remain then are whether “pure intent” is being used in some cases to refer to the purity of actuality itself or the purity-as-consciousness in particular… e.g. is it (source):
[Purity-as-consciousness] is a manifest life-force; a genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe.
or:
[The purity of actuality] is a manifest life-force; a genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe.
The latter reads more like it is a property of this universe itself, manifest as all the matter in the universe, the very rivers and trees as well, which sounds correct as how else could humans have evolved and gotten to where they are without it? The former is reading more about this purity for flesh-and-blood human bodies in particular, which is more directly relevant for becoming free, but more specific – yet it too would be originating in the “perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe”.
What do you think @Vineeto? I would say it is vital to have the terminology be accurate here, and maybe something should be changed of how we use the words, but at the end of the day, maybe not 
Cheers,
Claudiu
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Hi Claudiu,
You are 100% correct - what I described to Jon was sincere intent.
Cheers Vineeto
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Thank you Kuba,
But I have to agree with Claudiu that I used inaccurate terminology.
The agency Richard referred to when he described it to Rick was the agency derived from ‘his’ PCEs.
RICK: Incidentally, I cannot recall what you told me in-person about how and why or wherefrom you came to choose the words ‘pure intent’ when you coined that very term.
Would you mind sharing that again here?
RICHARD: ‘Twas the feeling-being in residence who named it thataway, circa January/ February 1981, upon realising how only that which was outside of ‘himself’ (i.e., outside of the human condition) could do the trick.
The choice of the word ‘pure’ should be self-explanatory by now, from all the above, and the word ‘intent’ is because of the agency-association it had, in ‘his’ mind, with the word ‘destiny’ … as in, ‘escape one’s fate and achieve one’s destiny’. (source)
Cheers Vineeto
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Thank you again Claudiu,
I much appreciate you responded with your very appropriate correction so quickly and at such length and with multiple quotes, and I am amazed how quickly you had all this at your fingertips.
Again, I very much appreciate your attention to the purity and accuracy of exact terminology on such an central issue as pure intent.
Cheers Vineeto
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