Hi, Adam
Adam M:Reminds me a lot of what I get from reading the Tao Te Ching (and what little I know of Zen).
Yeah. Seems to be some similarities. For example: The Taoist non-intervention ideal and the Zen beginners mind may be related to the ideas of innocence and sensuousness. There are intersections like those but also big differences like Zen's Big Mind and others practices and ideas that seem more esoteric and in conflict with the Richard's method (although it may be that those are merely a matter of semantics, I am no expert).
Adam M:Can you explain what actualism means to you, and how it relates to your other beliefs and practices?
I think the AFT site is great, but there is also some intellectual dishonesty in its relation to other practices. I don't know about the 180 degrees of opposition. What I know is that the majority of the Actualists on correspondence with the directors and the directors themselves were practitioners of some kind of Eastern methodologies before Actualism, so they must have at least some foundations from those.
Personally, I started with Tibetan Buddhism and then Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, a little bit of Zen and finally some Western Vipassana influenced my thought. Then came Actualism.
What I am trying to say is that, despite I sometimes think that with Actualism I achieved more in 4 months than with 2 years of Buddhism and other Eastern practices, for me is really more like climbing the same mountain with the help of different tools; more like a continuum than a radical change of paradigms. For example, it would a lot more difficult for me to practice attentiveness to sensuousness without the talks about mindfulness (of the body, of the mind, of the emotions) that I heard on
Audiodharma; or see the social conditioning more clearly without the ideas of Krishnamurti; or take distance to investigate (and not blindly react and not even being aware of) my feelings without cultivate the sense of the Watcher; etc.
Now, I dropped almost entirely the meditation thing but I can't deny the foundations that it gave me. To continue with the metaphor, I guess I encountered, in a higher level of the same mountain, a diverging path that I am following right now (but, in the same way, others kept walking the Buddhist path and got AF too).
So, I would suggest to drop the antagonism between methods because that brings a lot of doubt and better use the tools that prove useful at the moment; and, also, be aware of the major differences (even if conserving some Buddhist foundations) if you want to pursue AF. For example, this
thread results illuminating.