Creating a new thread to make it easier to open. Wow! 12 years flies by!
Part 1:
https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3139959
Beginning of Part 2:
Just going back over my old Actualism post, I found that Richard actually died this year on my birthday, which was creepy. Hopefully it was as rapid and painless as possible. I noticed that the website moved and I'll have to review my post 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.
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.
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?]." 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 inbetween state that's kind of yucky, which almost always center around expections 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 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.
This is where I am at so far.
