Hi,
Steph Wonka:it's quite clear to me that instead of being the bench-marker of "progress" or something that must be repeatedly recalled, the PCE should mostly be viewed as a carrot stick to keep one going (as in knowing that it's possible)
And yet this sounds a little bit paradoxical: how to keep going if one doesn't try to really reach for the carrot? If you are not trying to actively cultivate or remember a PCE, are you really keep going towards the carrot?
Peter says:
As I racked my memory in the weeks after meeting Richard and Devika, this was the pure consciousness experience, the PCE, that stood out – this was how I wanted to experience life permanently, twenty-four hours a day, and this now became my intention. To replicate that ‘self’-less experience, as this mortal flesh and blood body, permanently, effortlessly, without drugs, became my intent in life and, very soon, my total obsession
And Richard says:
RICHARD: Aye ... this commitment is of no use if it is confused with a resolve or a vow (a resolve or a vow can be broken). Commitment comes through curiosity. Only when one becomes curious about the workings of oneself – what makes one tick – is that person on the way to becoming committed to their search for freedom for the first time in their life. Then curiosity becomes fascination ... and then the fun begins. One is drawn inexorably further and further towards one’s destiny ... fascination leads to what others around one would classify as ‘obsession’. A 100% commitment to evoking peace-on-earth is thus actively discouraged by one’s peers. Eventually one realises that one is on one’s own in this, the adventure of a life-time ... then one takes the penultimate step ... one abandons ‘humanity’.
And:
It is the quality of pure intent is what pulls one forward with impunity ... pure intent transforms into action one’s determination to live a life full of gladness, peace and harmony with oneself, with a person of the other gender, and with all peoples. Pure intent produces total dedication – it is experienced as an irresistible enticement – and it makes it impossible not to do what is required (or to sweep an issue under the carpet and to let sleeping dogs lie) and to continue to conform to the long-failed dictates of the status-quo. [...] Pure intent 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. Freed by pure intent from the very necessary social constraints – designed to control a wayward ego and a compliant soul – one can have generosity of character without striving. Pure intent guides one in each and every situation and circumstance – it is an essential prerequisite to ensure a guaranteed passage through the psychic maze – until the primacy of ‘me’ as a psychological or psychic entity withers away.
With pure intent one will not rest until one has gone all the way.
In this endeavor, there is an affective desire (being) combined with pure intent (a force from the universe, that the universe itself calls). How to proceed? Apparently, working within one's territory obsessively (investigating feelings, cultivating happiness, harmlessness, naiveté) in order to uncover the universe's territory (PCE, AF): one needs to get closer affectively; but, also, actively try to sense that pure intent.
Let's say your default mode is "you" and the universe's default mode is physical, only experienced via PCE. In "you", the first mode blocks the experiencing of the last, but after all, you are also part of the universe, you're potentially part of its default mode. If this is true, then how one reaches what is already here anyways?
Perhaps a better metaphor than the carrot stick is finding yourself behind a curtain; that curtain is "you" and it's blocking the super-fun show that is already happening; "you" are blind to it. One needs to examine the curtain, see how its fibers are interwoven, remove its layers making it as translucent as possible, but also one needs to remember (or let the gravity of it get into you) how perfect was that occasion when part of that show was clearly revealed and to try to recreate the sensuous aspect of such experience.
I don't know if that was clear or different at all, but oh well