Is this it?
In a world where there’s conflict, exploitation and dissatisfaction, the human mind is always looking for freedom. Much of our travel, alcohol, drugs, entertainment, counselling and spirituality is about eliminating this pain with a hope for a permanent freedom. The greatest hook to get anyone to buy something, do something, commit to something, is to promise a better, superior, happiness and freedom. On the Richmond River in Eastern Australia resides a man named Richard, who promises not a real freedom, but an Actual Freedom.
Tradition and experimentation
With the many traditional religions mapping out the route of happiness for all of us, there would naturally be competitors, too numerous to mention. They are ready to find fault and claim that their own philosophies and religions are the final replacement. Along the way, there are disappointments, blind alley’s, and confusing abstractions that make new students scratch their heads in disbelief. But there are also new synergies, and perspectives that help refashion the old models into something desired by newer generations. As with all experiments, success happens mostly in small stages, and in insights found in real world applications. The rest turn out to be complete failures.
For all students, it’s up to them to make what they will of these different techniques and incorporate them into their own path.
Vineeto
For all spiritual seekers, they start off the same as everyone else. They try goals that their culture sets up for them. For many, following the culture is a life long goal, and it’s simply accepted. For others, each cultural option is like a prison that needs to be escaped from. One of these seekers is a woman named Vineeto.
“I have always searched for freedom in my life. Whenever I have felt stranded or trapped I eventually moved in the direction that appeared to offer greater freedom.” For Vineeto, marriage led to divorce. Left-wing politics, feminism and lesbianism offered solutions, but they still had the same competition and politics as the other systems they opposed. Meditation provided some relief, but it didn’t last. Following Rajneesh the Guru, led to losing the ability to think for oneself. By the time Vineeto encountered a man named Richard in Australia, she “could not, or did not want to, settle for any compromise, for something that did not show success – for anything less than an actual and permanent freedom.”
“I came across Richard and found a simple, straightforward method to actually get rid of emotions, instincts, the ‘self’ as well as the illusion of the very big ‘Self’, I was really interested! Here was someone who stated that there was more freedom possible than even enlightenment offered! Having come this far, having explored so many other approaches in my life and moved on when I saw that they failed, I did not want to turn away from this opportunity.”
http://actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/vineeto/vineeto.htm
Actualism’s Richard
Any talk of getting rid of anything sparks skepticism in a reader, as it should. For some it’s not possible to let go of the self, and for others to do that is a lobotomy. People may ask , “why would anyone want to do that to themselves?” Like in Vineeto’s example, many people are willing to try alternatives until the search is over.
Richard, a retired baby-boomer, living on a floating retreat on the Richmond River in the Northern Rivers area of eastern Australia, in his sample video clips, appears like a confident Australian guru, with a countenance of Abraham Lincoln, as he progressively convinces his visitors that his method is “eminently superior to anything anyone else has ever lived before.”
http://actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/orderformpaypal.htm
http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/richardsresume.htm
http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/floggedmisconceptions/FFM09a.htm#1
“The path to Actual Freedom delivers the goods – one progressively eliminates the impediments to one’s happiness and harmlessness incrementally and, as such, one has incremental success. One continually raises the bar to allow more of the perfection and purity of the actual world to become apparent and obvious in one’s life. This process, if undertaken with a sincere intent, will inevitably lead to a virtual freedom.
When one is virtually free from malice and sorrow one goes to bed at night time having had a 99% perfect day, knowing tomorrow will be equally perfect. In virtual freedom the immediate and the actual becomes one’s focus as this is, after all, the only moment I can experience of being alive.”
http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/path1.htm
This destruction of the self and social identity, the Self being the most abstract word in spirituality and psychology, raised more questions than answers, and required seekers to try for themselves…but not without a carrot.
The Pure Consciousness Experience (PCE)
Richard curated a list of descriptions of the Pure Consciousness Experience (PCE) on his website to help readers to comprehend “what an actual freedom from the human condition is.” He describes his first pure consciousness experience, which is a straightforward template for all other descriptions. “I remember the first time I experienced being the senses only… There was no identity as ‘I’ thinking or ‘me’ feeling … simply this body ambling across a grassy field in the early-morning light. A million dew-drenched spider-webs danced a sparkling delight over the verdant vista and a question that had been running for some weeks became experientially answered: without the senses I would not know that I exist as this flesh and blood body. And further to this: I was the senses and the senses were me. With this came an awareness of being conscious – apperception – rather than ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious.”
The following descriptions he chose describe an accessible heaven on earth full of marvelling, appreciation, delight, immersion into the senses, an absence of malice to control what cannot be controlled, an absence of sorrow for losing what cannot be controlled, vibrancy, richness, pleasure in the mundane, freshness, perfection in imperfection, and peace.
Yet this state was very fragile to grasping, boasting, and commentary, which are typical of human behaviour when something profound is uncovered. A testimonial by Rob describes this fragility. “And as quickly and spontaneously and uninvited it came, it left. The ‘me’ wanted to snatch the experience for itself and own it. Possess it. It is so strange to me, that, when it happens, it’s so obvious, so clearly the case, you know you can’t lose it – and the second you think that, it’s gone. It is like trying to grab a handful of water.”
http://actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/others/corr-pce.htm
“This is not the Actualism Method!”
Like a teacher that has precise instructions, and language, they hate when students take these tools and use them in ways not intended. Though Richard’s abstract website, an attempt to make himself clear, has choices of words that ironically lend themselves to misinterpretation, and misinterpretation is seen as inevitable when students have come from other disciplines, and their particular cultural and psychological backgrounds. There were also questions about Richard himself. Daniel Ingram of The Dharma Overground found that “numerous creepy rumors of unknown accuracy related to him just kept surfacing, things that again and again just didn’t seem to add up totally with what he had claimed. There were hints that reminded me of things that Bill Hamilton had warned about in his one book, Saints and Psychopaths. Others had more extreme views on him, considering him to be a totally insane, delusional, narcissistic psychopathic cult leader to be avoided at all costs.” Even on Richard’s website he responds to accusations of being a cult leader preying on the innocent and naive.
http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/floggedmisconceptions/FFM09.htm
Review: Saints and Psychopaths: https://rumble.com/v1gosbb-saints-and-psychopaths-by-william-l.-hamilton.html
“Richard needs [the chief disciple] for support. Every man desires a woman (or ‘chick for free’) who is willing to deny her feelings and intuitions, the very culprits for malice and sorrow … as far as Richard is concerned, that is.” Richard then responds with lots of denials and explanations of his method, often using a dictionary to find the most precise words. “…chief disciples are notorious for waxing and waning in their regard for their master … it would be a foolish person who depends upon the fickleness of another’s mood swings for support.”
http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/listdcorrespondence/listdjaundiced-tired-and-ill.htm
Daniel adds that, “luckily for me, I didn’t have to address those questions related to Richard directly, as I had my friends, and my friends were available to me easily and freely gave plenty of their time to answer questions and provide pointers. All of those pointers, namely really high levels of appreciating the field of sensate experience at all times when awake, trying to figure out how the PCE pointed to something important and clear, and really investigating the world of feelings honestly and simply, seeing how they arose, what conditions lead to their continuation, what value they had and didn’t have, and the like, all seemed perfectly sound advice that was leading to good things.” Though Daniel gave a strict prescription based on his positive results of the practice and what he felt was required to improve one’s baseline happiness. He said, “do it all day long for a year or two and see what it is does to you: taken to that dose and degree of dedication, you would be surprised at what can occur.”
Daniel also noticed similarities to the Majjhima Nikaya 20: Removal of Distracting Thoughts, especially with Richard’s practice of asking How Am I Experiencing This Moment Of Being Alive (HAIETMOBA)? “When evil unskillful thoughts connected with desire, hate, and delusion arise in a bhikkhu (monk) through reflection on an adventitious object, he should, (in order to get rid of that), reflect on a different object which is connected with skill. Then the evil unskillful thoughts are eliminated; they disappear.”
Removal of Distracting Thoughts: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.020.soma.html
Daniel’s post on differences and similarities between Buddhism and Actualism: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/503885#_19_message_503885
Richard’s responses to “Commonly raised objections”: http://actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/commonobjections/croindex.htm
My Experiments in Actualism – Daniel Ingram: http://integrateddaniel.info/my-experiments-in-actualism/
How am I experiencing this moment of being alive? HAIETMOBA
“Begin by asking, each moment again, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’?”
“Note: asking how I am experiencing this moment of being alive is *not* the actualism method.”
“Consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive *is* the actualism method.”
“The means to the end – an ongoing enjoyment and appreciation – are no different to the end.”
“Enjoyment and appreciation are facilitated by *feeling* as happy and as harmless as possible.”
“Felicity [happiness] and innocuity [harmlessness] are potently enabled by minimising both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings.”
“An affective awareness is the key to maximising felicity and innocuity over all alternate feelings.”
“A slightest diminishment of enjoyment and appreciation automatically activates attentiveness.”
“Attentiveness to the cause of diminished enjoyment and appreciation restores felicity/innocuity.”
“The habituation of actualistic awareness and attentiveness requires a persistent initialisation.”
“Persistent initialisation segues into a wordless approach, a non-verbal attitude towards life.”
“Consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is what the actualism method is.”
This moment of being alive: http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/thismomentofbeingalive.htm
To help understand these investigations of feelings, Vineeto explains her method, “To ask these questions was to sharpen my attentiveness as to how I felt, what I felt and why I felt it when I contemplated the issues that caused a mental block and this attentiveness also showed me how to move past those affective feelings that prevented a clearer understanding of those issues. In other words, attentiveness counteracts the instinctive ‘self’-centredness that is more or less happening all the time unless I become aware of it. Attentiveness combined with contemplation does wonders when one wants to penetrate ‘my’ automatically ongoing affective reactiveness to emotionally charged topics. Eventually my burning desire and my persistence not to settle for anything less than indisputable facts won over my fears of questioning what I believed to be absolutely right and true and, to make a long story short, one day something had to give – ‘my’ worldview collapsed in one fell swoop and I had my first pure consciousness experience which lasted for a night and the better half of the next day.”
Vineeto ~ Selected Writings: How to Investigate Feelings: http://actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/vineeto/selected-writings/investigatefeelings.htm
Richard adds that “once the specific moment of ceasing to feel good is pin-pointed, and the silliness of having such an incident as that (no matter what it is) take away one’s enjoyment and appreciation of this only moment of being alive is seen for what it is – usually some habitual reactive response – one is once more feeling good … but with a pin-pointed cue to watch out for next time so as to not have that trigger off yet another bout of the same-old same-old. This is called nipping it in the bud before it gets out of hand … with application and diligence and patience and perseverance one soon gets the knack of this and more and more time is spent enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive. And, of course, once one does get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy and harmless’ … and after that to ‘feeling perfect’. The more one enjoys and appreciates being just here right now – to the point of excellence being the norm – the greater the likelihood of a PCE happening … a grim and/or glum person has no chance whatsoever of allowing the magical event, which indubitably shows where everyone has being going awry, to occur. Plus any analysing and/or psychologising and/or philosophising whilst one is in the grip of debilitating feelings usually does not achieve much (other than spiralling around and around in varying degrees of despair and despondency or whatever) anyway. The wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom from the human condition is marked by enjoyment and appreciation – the sheer delight of being as happy and harmless as is humanly possible whilst remaining a ‘self’ – and the slightest diminishment of such felicity/ innocuity is a warning signal (a flashing red light as it were) that one has inadvertently wandered off the way. One is thus soon back on track … and all because of everyday events.“
Mental Stirrings – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2004/040227%20Mental%20Stirrings.mp3
Albert Ellis: A Guide to Rational Living: https://youtu.be/GyRE-78g_z0
Again the abstractness appears in the writing, but Richard points to what is also found in many other meditation practices, that it is okay to interrupt your thought stream and to see that what you think is reality is not actual. A student of cognitive therapy and Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy would understand the use of thinking to analyze disturbing distractions for illogical, or distorted thoughts until they are seen through and abandoned. It’s well known that any thoughts that don’t conform to reality, cause stress and confusion. For the practitioner, this would be a major area to investigate, even before getting caught in distorted thoughts. As the practice of abandoning the distractions develops, one can see the negative emotions related to those thoughts, and the opportunity to replace them with consistent enjoyment and appreciation of the moment, and strengthen the possibility of a PCE occurring. When PCE’s happen they can be markers in the memory to be brought up again after each bout with distorted thoughts is let go of.
Actual Freedom
When Vineeto got to her Actual Freedom, she described it as follows: “There was no fear, no experience of death, no physical phenomena or changes, just the realization that I have always been here in this eternal moment in time, in this luminous magical world, more naked than I was born and utterly safe. The stillness in my head was palpable (and has remained so ever since). Richard asked me a few test-questions to confirm what just had happened. We exchanged a few notes of how it is to live in this actual world and we found that our experiences matched.
For instance I noted that sentences were now coming out of me as if from nowhere – there was no causal sequence of thoughts preceding a conclusion (such as because A there is B and therefore C) but my thoughts/words were rather emerging from a surprising overall all-encompassing awareness that then voiced results out of a reservoir of my accumulated knowledge and experience on a particular topic.
The next morning was the real test – I half-expected that I had reverted back to normal but the world was just as brilliant, beneficial and wunderbar as I had experienced it the night before. I am still surprised how easy it all turned out to be in the end.
Make no mistake in thinking that it needs a personal contact with Richard in order to take the last step to becoming actually free. What it needs is the unwavering and undiminished intent (100%) to bridge the separation that stands in the way of an actual intimacy with another human being – any human being – and secondly the awareness and intent that what one is doing is not for oneself but for everybody in order for the self-less purity to unfold its magic.”
The Fat Lady Has Finally Sung…Vineeto’s Report of Becoming Newly Actually Free: http://actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/vineeto/BecomingFree.htm
Similarities to the Psychology of Flow
For the life of me I couldn’t understand entirely what Richard was going on about, and yet I was able to bump into my own PCE while working on the New Year’s Day Guided Meditation. It wasn’t exactly like the instructions Richard put forth, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow instructions, in the book Finding Flow, which pointed to similar problems related to social conditioning. “What we put our attention to becomes the focal point of our consciousness, and therefore becomes a determiner of our happiness.”
As I focused on my goals for the day I noticed that there were images of people in my mind that were interfering with my concentration. But like in a concentration meditation I was able to let go of these influences and get back to my object of choice, my goal. At that point it was like an intrinsic interest, to be more specific from the term intrinsic motivation. It required that I concentrated on the benefits of a different choice long enough so that it took over consciousness and I was motivated to act on it. At first, the motivation was weaker and less developed than old habits, but the concentration and a patience to wait for the resistance to exhaust itself and relax, won out. What appeared as resistance was essentially a social self, or social conditioning. When the consciousness had no competition for its attention it could act on the chosen object with an internal motivation, free of the need for permission from or fear of authority figures. It was also free of a need for validation from them.
It was heavenly. I connected with that childlike wonder and interest in the world, because I waited long enough for the social conditioning, from external rewards and punishments, to fade away. Going home, as mundane as it was, was a lot like going to a vacation accommodation, with all the interest and wonder of a vacation or the pleasure of engaging a cherished hobby. It symbolically reminded me of the sequence in the ambient track, Abundance on Aphex Twin’s Collapse, starting at 02:42. A personal control of an ambient felicity. The social self that is so addictive, that needs constant soothing, that can be so stressed about scarcity and competition, and that for some people fosters a depression that can be a permanent fixture in their lives, and is a subtle presence haunting everyone’s life, fell away.
abundance10edit [2 R8’s, FZ20m & a 909] by Aphex Twin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrWTZk0sMS4
Asking Mihaly’s question, “how immersed, and engaged are you?” with the social brain, pointed to that immersion into the senses just as they were, and then a relaxing of the need to prop up the social brain, because the mind’s intrinsic interest took over consciousness. It lasted for a half an hour until the social brain started measuring the value of what was found, thereby eating the cake, and not having it anymore. The “look what I found” part of the brain comes back. Seeing the power and danger of the social self, and how it can be used by others to control you, and your happiness became apparent. Mainly these were threats to survival. Whether it’s a relationship threat or a workplace threat, it did the same to the mind. It made the social brain into a slave to please others. I now had a clear template of what to do, but also a nagging question for further research: If the social brain exists in our mind, it must be for a purpose and trying to permanently get rid of it eliminates the chance to develop skills to use that part of the brain in good ways.
The Bāhiya Sutta: https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.than.html
I also felt that a “wordless approach, a non-verbal attitude towards life,” had some inferiority to the Buddhist approach that includes thoughts. It’s true we can be addicted to thinking, and have pointless thinking, but thinking was still a part of my Flow experience. It may not have been “the actualism method” but it was a valuable marker for Flow experiences, and there are thoughts that are enjoyable and provide enormous value. Mihaly also understood that there is boredom and stress. If activities are too easy or too hard, the practitioner is not likely to be in these beautiful states for too long. Any diseases could easily derail the experience and bring back the reactive part of the mind. Yet ongoing appreciation of what you have, which is only the present moment, seemed worth developing. Mindfulness in Buddhism can harbour an unconscious aversion to pleasure to such an extent that the peace one develops is too dry.
Rob Burbea’s warning of how the variety in the psyche can be “flattened”: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/28026/
Social rewards
After that Flow experience, the social brain was back online and feeding on interesting insights. It appears to me now that the social self is what many personality disorders are stuck in. The marker for a healthy self in one’s own experience is found, and is independent of the self that needs to win, dominate, and control, with all the misery, pride and folly that is attributed to narcissistic measuring of oneself with others as the single source of happiness. Whether Richard chooses to describe the self as malice and sorrow, it doesn’t matter. In my experience ambition is still there, but it was about learning and engagement. It was different than concentration attainments in eastern meditation practices in that there was a perfume, a juicy aliveness, along with the relief of stress. Here there was a dividing line between people who still preferred to reduce emotional pain as low as possible, and those who simply wanted to bring back that wonder they had in childhood, that adult competition for money and mates diminished as the years went by. Some students go one path and other students go another path according to their disposition, and original intentions.
The other difference from the social self was seeing that many of the objects of interest had a promise of a social reward. I remember being mindful while driving and parking next to a Mini Cooper and my mind started imagining a lifestyle with this Mini Cooper and also an unconscious promise of social rewards related to increased status. That became a benchmark for the different desires. Desires for social rewards, versus desires based on learning and intrinsic interest. The social rewards were more intense and stressful due to the pleasure of those rewards and of a lack of control inherent in social rewards. For example, if I got the Mini Cooper, it’s quite likely I will get zero social rewards for it. It’s just a car. This describes the inherent boredom found by narcissists, psychopaths, and even normal people who achieve fame. Even if you achieve big things, “other people won’t let you have it,” as singer and guitarist Jack White points out in that fantastic interview with Conan O’Brian.
Rocker Jack White – Serious Jibber-Jabber with Conan O’Brien (cited topic starts 34:16): https://youtu.be/AJgY9FtDLbs
Further insights
Mihaly says in his book Flow, “To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”
This explained to me larger phenomenon, such as artists looking like people who didn’t want to grow up. It explained Marxist arguments about alienation and trying to bring a sense of play to the work world, that ultimately was impractical in that individuals in a communist society, or any commune for that matter, still had to deal with a competitive social self in each individual’s mind, full of greed, envy, and jealousy. It explained the similar arguments from Capitalists who believed in the value of the motivation found in freedom to run your own company, who also felt less alienated. The impractical side of course were those who worked for the owner, who didn’t have that sense of wonder and exploration due to their attention span being controlled.
Everybody seems to have an intuitive understanding of what they want to protect from destruction, but the social self, inside all of our minds, always finds a way of spoiling it with ego conflicts. Another practitioner, Peter, talked of being “virtually free” 99% of the time, an unscientific number, before achieving Actual Freedom. It unfortunately leaves an out for the social self to keep interrupting people, like a shadow self, causing hypocrisy. In the end the PCE is not meaningless, and cultivating it so it can become more of a habit is not senseless, but quite healthy mentally. Yet there is a need to protect these states in an artificial commune experience. What peer reviewed tests could be made to prove these practices lead to a long-term Actual Freedom? As long as survival threats exist on this planet, which they obviously do, the Pure Consciousness Experience, and any other habits, are not permanent mind states. Can one be in this state while undergoing horrendous physical pain? If one was homeless, how would a PCE be helpful or relevant? These practices reduce psychological pain, but the proof that these these states can be maintained in a harsh environment is nil, and I’m sure there aren’t any volunteers.
Virtual Freedom: http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/path1.htm
This was confirmed by another testimonial on the site by Claudiu, he said it “won’t necessarily lead to lasting relationships, or to good jobs, or good income, or a family, or becoming well-known or well-respected, or leaving a legacy behind or anything like that. Living actually free is definitely pointless from the real-world perspective.” This is also confirmed in the work of Daniel Kahneman, that shows that complex thinking drains energy. One has to engage with complex thinking if society is to develop technologically, and an Actualism lifestyle would only work for someone like Richard, who is retired.
Claudiu’s report: http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/others/claudiu%27sreport.htm
Attention and Effort – Daniel Kahneman: https://rumble.com/v1gpl0j-attention-and-effort-daniel-kahneman.html
So what kind of world would it be where more people are happy and harmless? Would it also make us weak and vulnerable to those who choose not to, and cannot develop these psychological intentions? I’m aiming at my favourite targets, the narcissists, who do the opposite, and drop the intrinsic interest and exclusively double-down on self-measuring and moving up hierarchies of power and fame with the social brain, regardless of conflict.
One of the Actualist practitioners, Jon, makes it plain: “Of course, I reserve the right to defend my person and property.” The need to be harmful, in a protective way, and the value of the social self, to connect with others, challenges us to find a way to use that part of the brain in a skillful way, instead of abandoning it. From a psychological perspective, there is to be no lobotomy. All areas of the mind have a purpose and usefulness for survival and a thriving life. Then there’s also the addictive tolerance, and boredom of such experiences, or any experience that repeats, whether it’s extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. This will have to be explored in future reviews.
Jon’s summary of the Actualism method: https://github.com/ActualFreedom/home/wiki/The-Actualism-Method
UPDATE: Richard has passed away: https://discuss.actualism.online/t/richard-has-passed-away/983
Just going back over this old Actualism post, I decided to see if definitions can be refined even further to clarify in a helpful way. The new site seems to have a search function, which is helping me find things MUCH EASIER.
https://actualfreedom.com.au/search/index.htm
I searched up Richard’s important “persistant initialisation,” which to me is a mindfulness/concentration to go into a wordless approach. Again, so much is like Buddhism here. Everyone wants to remove excess thinking by noticing the energy loss so that it doesn’t unconsciously takeover the foreground of experience. In my search I found a helpful response:
https://actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/peter/list-af/corr03a.htm
“As one knows from the pure consciousness experiences (PCE’s), which are moments of perfection everybody has at some stage in their life, that it is possible to experience this moment in time and this place in space as perfection personified, ‘I’ set the minimum standard of experience for myself: feeling good. If ‘I’ am not feeling good then ‘I’ have something to look at to find out why. What has happened, between the last time ‘I’ felt good and now? When did ‘I’ feel good last? Five minutes ago? Five hours ago? What happened to end those felicitous feelings? Ahh … yes: ‘He said that and I …’. Or: ‘She didn’t do this and I …’. Or: ‘What I wanted was …’. Or: ‘I didn’t do …’. And so on and so on … one does not have to trace back into one’s childhood … usually no more than yesterday afternoon at the most (‘feeling good’ is an unambiguous term – it is a general sense of well-being – and if anyone wants to argue about what feeling good means … then do not even bother trying to do this at all).”
This alleviates some of that pressure to look for “perfect” experiences, which I still think are Flow states (not perfect, because nothing is), but based on sensation, as opposed to purely intellectual flow, and the equanimity jhana (minimising both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings). Flow states let go of the sense of a heavy “I” and what people are complaining about is actually the super-ego that is literally attacking the mind by making a preference lack forefront, a stress pressure to make one uneasy to motivate action to change things. To go back to why one felt better is simply the time before a stressful, ruminating, worried, catastrophizing, etc., thought appeared, along with the stress pressure to control. Once a person returns to a “general sense of well-being,” then one is back. It doesn’t have to be a major HIGH. A wordless approach is just mindfulness of thinking, and the mind just realizes it’s hurting itself, by paying attention wordlessly to the sensations of the mind making itself feel bad, to motivate changing oneself or the environment. The wordless realization is when the unconscious lets go of the self-induced pain automatically so that consciously what remains is well-being.
He does rail on in that link about expressing emotions in the therapeutic way, but he’s wrong about that, especially with this kind of concentration, where repressed content comes out MORE, not less (Eg. Willoughby Britton). Some forms of shame, low self-esteem, paranoia, catastrophizing, etc., are so deep that one has to explore those areas until enough mystery is exposed. Once that has happened then meditation becomes much easier to handle. There are also periods where feeling well-being will return when a preference in the environment is practically taken care of. -> See any psychoanalysis chapters already uploaded.
The important thing is carrying on with life not paralyzed, (Right Effort etc.), by letting go of indulging useless energy-wasting content, while allowing the important thoughts to combine with actions. As momentum builds, the jhanas can appear “one up-levels ‘feeling good’ [1st/2nd jhana?], as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy’ [3rd jhana?]. And after that: ‘feeling perfect’ [4th jhana?].”
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
These states naturally breakdown again when imperfect life circumstances arise bringing up deeply lodged irksomeness over preferences, which is the hardest thing to control when expectations aren’t not kept to a minimum. I would just add that humble attitudes about reactivity can open things up so that one can catch these reactions as a form of over-efforting so that one isn’t caught in a loop over the mistake and one can prioritize focus instead on relaxing effort in real time. In fact, this seems to help when I get caught in a malaise, or in-between state that’s kind of yucky, which almost always center around expectations and desires to control the future.
The only thing I can think of adding is the Heideggerian sense of wonder that anything exists at all. This increases appreciation and “shining” for both nature and technology. It helps with that “grooving” on sensation that cheats the equanimity a little bit. How I do it, is pondering wordlessly why questions, like “why these colors and shapes and not something else?” “why these laws of physics?” I also try to imagine a universe other than this one so that the uncanny reality pops back as it is because this is the only REAL universe we are aware of. The momentum brings up appreciations for the sensations, shapes and colors that were just moments ago taken for granted. I’ve done this persistently sitting at a park bench and eventually a jhana appears, but it’s more like a Wonder Jhana with Wonder flavors, compared to just the rapture absorption as per normal.
The Presocratics: Heraclitus: https://rumble.com/v1gst93-the-presocratics-heraclitus.html
This is where I am at so far.
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Worlds – Thanissaro Bhikkhu
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/Meditations2/Section0036.html
Exercising the mind – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2018/181007_Exercising_the_Mind_(outdoors).mp3
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi:
Finding Flow: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465024117/
Flow: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780062151605/
Niemiec, C. P., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2009). The Path Taken: Consequences of Attaining Intrinsic and Extrinsic Aspirations in Post-College Life. Journal of research in personality, 73(3), 291-306.
Abeyta, Andrew & Routledge, Clay & Sedikides, Constantine. (2016). Material Meaning: Narcissists Gain Existential Benefits From Extrinsic Goals. Social Psychological and Personality Science. 8. 10.1177/1948550616667618.
Photos:
Hibiscus Flower and Spider-web with dew from www.pexels.com
La richmond River à Casino en Nouvelle-Galles du Sud en Australie By Peter 1968 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Small_richmondriver.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3478930
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/