Hi @roy
I remember having all these confusions myself too !
This was Richard’s explaination :
[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’.
[…snip ‘fate/destiny’ quote…].
Lastly, the term “life force” has been and is used to describe what gives life to matter in different traditions, but it’s a term I personally wouldn’t use, for various reasons. I find it puzzling that Richard chose them.
This question was raised to Richard by me hehe and thusly he clarified :
The expression “life-force” – originally one of several English translations of the French “élan vital”[
](javascript:void(0)) coined by Mr. Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), in his 1907 book ‘Creative Evolution’, as a hypothetical explanation for the driving force of evolution (élan = impetus, impulse, momentum) – has become a generic term meaning more-or-less whatever a writer/ a speaker chooses to have it refer to. For example, some 1920’s vitalism proponents gave “élan vital” a pronounced mystico-spiritual meaning (as denoting what is known as ‘prāṇa’ in Sanskrit) whereas latter-day evolutionists, geneticists for instance, were dismissive of any ‘driving-force’ hypothesis (in a similar way to the early 1900’s theoretical physicists’ dismissal of a luminiferous aether being the medium whereby radiant energy propagates through space).
As the word ‘life’ itself – just like the word ‘nature’ for instance – is also utilised in a generic (non-specific) way, on occasion, I am reminded of the following brief exchange.[snip exchange]
Thus when I first wrote, some 20-odd years ago in ‘Richard’s Journal’, that “pure intent is a palpable life-force; an actually occurring stream of…&c…” it is the dynamic factor implicit in the above “matter is not merely passive” observation that the generic term “life-force” refers to (élan vital=lit. vital impetus).
I could have as easily written something like: “pure intent is a palpable potency; an actually occurring stream of…&c…”, for instance or, for another example, “pure intent is a palpable puissance; an ever-fresh permeation of …&c…”, because what is being conveyed by those words is the invigorative quality, or dynamic nature, of that [quote] “immaculate perfection and purity [snip]
I think Roy we think alike lol as I was terribly confused about the word benevolence…benignity was easy to grasp for instance thinking of a benign tumor or reflecting on the fact that a bullet coming to kill me is benign in the sense it has no intention to kill me
Here is what he clarified about benevolence :
Richard : Re your query about ‘the benevolence aspect’ of the actual world: perhaps if you were to think of it in a similar way to what is expressed in the phrase ‘a benevolent climate’, for instance, it might start to make sense.
Here are a few random samples from an Internet Search:
• [quote]: ‘… an ideal combination of fertile soil, high altitude and a benevolent climate …’ [endquote].
• [quote]: ‘These destinations, and the benevolent climate, attract national and international visitors …’ [endquote].
• [quote]: ‘… could not understand why residents of Southern California settled for widespread use of deciduous trees and shrubs when a benevolent climate could …’ [endquote].
• [quote]: ‘The year-round agriculture and benevolent climate gives distinct seasonal character to this area …’ [endquote].
• [quote]: ‘Abundant natural resources with benevolent climate is the primary source of this historical prosperity …’ [endquote].
Of course, I mean it in much more than a ‘conducive to life’/ ‘conducive to growth’ sense … oft-times expressed by me as ‘I am swimming in largesse’, for example, so as to convey the super-abundance of life, here, in this pristine paradise which this verdant and azure planet is in actuality. Viz.:
• [Richard]: (…) this actual world, the world of the senses, is indeed characterised by benevolence and benignity (there is neither cruelness nor horrors in actuality). However, in the real world, the world of the psyche, any such kindly disposition – as in being well-disposed, bountiful, liberal, bounteous, beneficent (aka benevolent) and being favourable, propitious, salutary (aka benign) – being not readily apparent, as in directly experienceable, requires naiveté for its intellectual ascertainment.
I am, of course, using the word ‘kindly’ in its Oxford Dictionary ‘acceptable, agreeable, pleasant; spec. (of climate, conditions, etc.) benign, favourable to growth’ meaning … and which I generally express by saying I am swimming in largesse.
For example:
• [Co-Respondent]: ‘In the PCE, there is a clear sense that something of momentous importance is happening, at least it seemed that way for me. The excellence experience, if not labelled such, might seem to be an experience of exceptional clarity and lucidity. With the PCE, words like bounteousness, bursting, pouring forth, vibrant, clear, alive, animate, come to mind.
• [Richard]: ‘The words ‘exceptional clarity and lucidity’ strikes me as being a very good description of the distinction when compared with ‘bounteousness, bursting, pouring forth’ and so on as I am swimming in largesse’.
(Actual Freedom Mailing List, Gary, 15 August 2000)
Or even more specifically:
• [Co-Respondent]: ‘Does this [allowing a PCE to happen] take nerves of steel?
• [Richard]: ‘No, apart from spontaneous PCE’s (most common in childhood) it takes happiness and harmlessness: where one is happy and harmless a benevolence and benignity that is not of ‘my’ doing operates of its own accord … and it is this beneficence and magnanimity which occasions the PCE.
The largesse of the universe (as in the largesse of life itself), in other words’.
In short: I do not use the words benevolent/ benevolence and benign/ benignity as antonyms to the words malevolent/ malevolence and malign/ malignity (such as to require reconciliation) as the latter exists only in the human psyche
Cheers
Shashank