Ok well I just remembered that I was supposed to be doing this, oops. Here is what I have so far - I have done part 1 without editing it sufficiently.
D = Daniel Ingram
T = Tarin Greco
D: Welcome Everybody
T: Hello
D: I'm Daniel Ingram
T: Tarin Greco
D: We're sitting here at Hurricane Ranch in Alabama, and we are going to be talking today about AF. It's worth knowing that Tarin here claims actual freedom, I myself claim mere Arahantship. So we will be going to be going back and forth talking about AF today. So I thought we would start off talking about how AF may or may not relate to various traditions. I thought I'd let Tarin start this off, because we've both thought a lot about it but he has got some good stuff.
T: Well, Richard, the Actual Freedom Trust guy, the guy that founded the Actual freedom method which is the means by which an actual freedom is achieved, attained, realized, is adamant, is absolutely firm in his conviction that this is entirely new to human history. What I am entirely sure about is that this is entirely new to any humans that I've met, and any humans who have written a clear description of their modes of experience that I've read or have heard about. What's not as clear to me is that this has never been discovered, before, because I have found references to what sure seemed like the PCE in old texts.
Something else that Richard has acknowledged is that the PCE is not new, he goes as far as to say that possibly everybody has had one at some point or another. However the recognition of the pure consciousness experience as something that is both possible, and worthy of being made a continuous experience, this is entirely new, and this is what he has termed an "actual freedom." This really may be the case, there is no firm evidence that says it isn't, so if I were to give a hard and fast answer about it, I would say "yea" it may be entirely possible that he's the first. But I'm not confident enough to give a hard and fast answer as such, because of various places where this is indicated to be the ideal outcome in many ways. It depends how you read and interpret. The fact [is] that an actual freedom, and I am speaking from experience here, not just having read about it or heard about it from Richard or any of the other people who did it before I did, does match the orthodox, traditional models of what enlightenment is much, much more closely than that mode of experience that is proposed in what has come to be known as the "hardcore dharma movement" (Dan, Kenneth Folk, a few other people). This looks a lot more like the traditional model than that did.
D: In some ways, but you must admit the problem of nanas and jhanas and those sorts of things. If you look at the old texts, they say "the buddha praised those arahants who had the formed and formless jhanas." And the buddha himself on his deathbed rising up into jhanas and then going into nirodha and then coming out and all that. You must admit that that looks nothing like what happens in AF, that's one of those arguments against that particular point of you. Because it simply doesn't quite line up right. Neither quite lines up right. Neither what I call arahantship nor what you call AF quite line up with Arahantship found in the old texts, because the arahants clearly had jhanas if you read the old texts or so it seems. And I as an arahant have jhanas. And yet in AF mode, or PCE mode I should say I can't hit a jhana at all that does anything, and then when I come out of that I have jhanas again, and things seem to cycle in a nana like fashion, and so it simply doesn't quite align.
T: Well, in the old and texts, and by this I am referring to the Pali Canon, there is a mention of Arahants that do not have all the jhanas. You know which one I am talking about, the release through discernment as opposed to the release through [concentration].
D: That's true.
T: Basically the basis for wet insight and dry insight, that distinction. But it is admittedly so, that there is no documentation of people who had jhanas and then through further attainment lost them.
D: Then through further attainment simply couldn't access them, right.
T: Well you've seen for yourself now, as of a few weeks ago, what happens when you try to go into jhana which is that:
D: Attention moves a little bit in various directions, but there is absolutely nothing beyond that in terms of anything that feels like a jhana at all.
T: Well that's because there's nobody there who can go into jhana. I mean, there needs to be that inchoate sense of being, that feeling of being for there to be, as you call it, an attention wave; or as I call it, a stir of passions to focus, and to sculpt, and to spread out in various ways. The focusing, and sculpting, and spreading out of which constitute a jhanic attainment, a jhanic strata.
D: Sure, which raises the whole point of this being something else, something beyond and gets into the whole tricky question of whether or not this is 180 degrees from enlightenment or a normal continuation from enlightenment. Richard, of course, being the one who claims it's 180 degrees, which can be argued based on the fact that in vipassana practice we attain nanas and we attain jhanas and we perceive vibrations and reality gets relatively distorted at points. Then you can go on to attain formless realms where you're tuned out from anything normal, or nothingness where your basically tuned out from just about everything. These are extremely distorted versions of the sense field. Yes, rarified. Yes, very pleasurable or profound. But still distorted by a very, very fine tuning of what I'd call the attention wave or attention itself. Based on that sort of logic, if the PCE is the absolute absence of a tunable attention wave in that particular way, and AF is then the elimination of that attention wave, you could argue that the two are 180 degrees diametrically opposed to each other. Because one is about an attention wave that can penetrate all kinds of things, do all kinds of things, create all kinds of things and bring one valid insights into the selflessness of phenomena, and those sorts of things. The fact that nanas and jhanas don't seem to arise in AF mode further argues for their difference.
Argument for continued progression of things from arahantship to AF would be that arahants seem to have a curiously easy time, compared to non-arahants given the incredibly few number of data points that we have. If you look at Trent and Tarin, you think your friend Mes is doing something, is that right?
T: Mes? Yea. Mes is clearly, clearly close.
D: And he's a skilled... what did you say he was?
T: He got arahantship before I did.
D: There you go.
T: He hadn't been doing meditation for all to long, he was a very, very dedicated Tai Chi practitioner like maybe two years, a year and a half. Then he got into doing vipassana, and then he, through me, found Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, and without even reading it himself, I mean this is before the book came out, I was printing it off of the internet and letting him borrow certain chapters, and telling him about my experiences with it. Completely unbeknownst to me he was staying home, and just knocking the thing out. From morning to night. I kind of noticed "oh yea, he's just not coming out, we aren't seeing very much of him" myself, and some of his other friends, that I know. It's only later that he told me, it's not like he was trying to hide it or anything, that he was doing was staying home and practicing, day and night. He got stream entry after a just a few weeks of doing that. Despite having only ever sat one retreat, a 10-day Goenka course, before. Then he moved on through the paths, in fact he got second path before I got stream entry, and I was a bit dubious about this, I was like "wellllll I don't know."
D: Isn't it annoying being 1-up'd?
T: It was, I remember that, it really, really was. I wasn't just skeptical, I was downright cynical. I was slightly resentful, I did not think that it was possible.
D: Just like I was when when you were initially presenting that you were pursuing AF, same kind of thing, but go on.
T: Then after I had a bit of experience with the thing, read: I got stream entry, I come back, and I hear him talk, and he's not saying anything different, I'm just hearing it differently, it was like "alright, this guy got stream entry, and by the sounds of it, considering he knows what he's talking about, he may well have gotten second path." I remember, after having gotten back, just teaching him to go through the jhanas, the eight jhanas, the four formed and four formless jhanas, and him just doing it, without any question, with a sentence or two of instruction about each. Going in, abiding, coming back out, telling me what it was like, I'd go "right, that sounds about right." So he was clearly a skilled practitioner, he was good at doing mental exercises, which is what all this meditation, insight practice stuff is about.
D: Yea. How to tune your mind, how to incline your mind, how to perceive.
T: It wasn't until after he had gotten what he thought of as arahantship, it was long after it that I did, got arahant, less than a month [after] that we were just sitting around in a park one day, and I was telling him about what I thought. He had heard about some of it before, but I was telling him about actual freedom, and I was telling him about my recent, like 4, 5, 6 hour long PCE that I'd had a few months before that. And it seemed like a twinkle of recognition occurred in his eye, he paused and contemplated and asked me a few questions that just seemed like "yea, I can see why one would ask that, yes that's what it's like." He described to me some type of experience he had, going on a school trip as a kid. I said "yea, that's sounds about right, that direction, that way of experiencing." He went off, a few days, a week later, he came back and told me "hey, I had a PCE, I remembered a PCE, and I know how to do it." And a week or two after that he was in what the Actual Freedom trust writers describe as a virtual freedom.
D: Maybe for those who are following along who are less familiar with this terminology we should go ahead and define PCE and those sorts of thing, and lay down some basic criteria and descriptions of what they're like.
T: Sure, sure. Do you want to go with the PCE considering you have more recent experience with it.
D: Sure, so given that PCE and AF are not quite the same in some ways, and that the PCE has a sort of a thrill or charge to it, most of the time, at least initially when it hits it seems to. So, PCE-mode for me is different from cycle mode in that PCE mode is extremely direct. Things are not shifting, or fluxing, things are just there, so if I look at my hand in cycle mode, it seems to be sampling, sampling, sampling, this stream of impermanent sensations, about my hand. If I look at my hand in PCE mode, there's just my hand. There it still is, and still is just as much in this eerily continuous way.
T: And yet...
D: Yes, the had moves, and the light may subtly change on it, it moves slightly, yet there is not the sampling quality in anything like the same way. Attention seems to be very much, or I should say mostly, because thing kind of fades in and out and it is hard to tell when it ends; very much with this sort of direct, amazing brilliance. Such that colors are just fantastic, shapes are just fantastic, sounds are just wonderful. The fact of basic sensate reality is just this amazing, wonderful thing. It's kind of like where people describe tripping and they're like (trippy voice) "oh my ankle was just unbelievable." It's kind of like that except this doesn't have that high, in that same goofy, high kind of way. But it has some of that wonderful directness of attention that people describe in those sorts of states. So the PCE contrasts with cycle mode in that within PCE-mode jhanas seem to do nothing. So during this, what seemed to be a 53 hour run of a PCE, which is my longest yet to date, a week or so ago, Tarin asked me to see what I could do if I tried to go into jhana. I would try to move attention around, and attention would sort of go forward, and I tried to go into first jhana and it was just nose and room and breath and skull and ordinary physical reality just kind of looking in that direction of it. Then it would kind of widen out to two and widen a little further to three and widen a little further to four, but it was that simply some aspect of where the focus of attention was would widen out, but it absolutely did nothing whatsoever in terms of jhana at all. Other things I've noticed about the PCE is that it's curiously refreshing, I can work much longer in it than I can in normal Cycle mode.
T: Normal arahant mode
[both laugh]
D: In ordinary, run-of-the-mill arahant mode.
T: I'll add something to your description that you're taking for granted.
D: Oh, sorry, go ahead.
T: Which is the centerlessness...
D: Yes.
T: Of the experience, if that's not there, it's not a PCE.
D: The centerlessness, the boundarylessness of the field of experience has an open stability that it doesn't have even in arahant mode. Because that openness, that centerlessness, that boundlessness, is somehow warped or moved or phased or something by the attention wave, and the attention wave is what would allow you to have nanas or jhanas or to tune what parts of it your tuning in to. Without that, there is just this wide open field, the sense of out-from-controlness or body-just-moving-on-its-own-ness or words-just-coming-on-their-ownness is extremely striking. The body just seems to do what it needs to do based on whatever natural intelligence and skill and understanding is present. That is a really remarkable thing to perceive well, so in that way you could easily argue that this is not 180 degrees to awakening, this is just a further continuation into even less self, that last bastion of self being the attention wave itself. The attention wave, and this is a critical point that I think you'll like so I'll say it briefly then you can say more about it if you like, because your better at this than me, the attention wave being not only what creates nanas and jhanas but also creates affective feeling and here's where things get controversial so I'll let you talk about this for a while because your better at doing this than I am.
T: Well, one way that being actually free is different from occasionally, or even often, having pure consciousness experiences is that there isn't this "wow" factor.
D: Yea, whereas PCEs particularly when they initially hit really have a bright, clear "wow" factor that really is just delicious.
T: It's just so utterly, utterly different from anything else. Vineeto, one of the writers and directors of the Actual Freedom Trust on their homepage described the PCE as the self speaking from abeyance, I'm just paraphrasing here, from the corner, going "wow." Whereas even later when things kind of get muddled, where your not even sure your having PCEs anymore, everything just seems to be a big, muted or refined PCE...
D: Right, like my 53-hour-thing didn't have the "wow" factor after it initially kicked in, but I couldn't get jhana, I needed little sleep, there was little sense of fatigue, there was a vague sense of cycling but it was trivial and seemed to do nothing in terms of irritation or pleasure or bliss or anything.
T: There's this calmness and consistency, yet you wouldn't call it dull in any way would you?
D: Oh no, it's very bright-minded, it's very alert.
T: So there's an exuberance without any jiterriness.
D: Yes.
T: There is a clarity to the thing that is entirely sensate, and not merely a mental quality such that "clarity" is a metaphor, the clarity is immediate.
D: It's kind of like what people are looking for in caffeine but without any edginess to it at all.
[Tarin laughs]
T: Yea, yea. So back to the last thing that Dan said when he spoke at length about the PCE being devoid of affective qualities.
D: Largely, largely devoid... the PCE is largely devoid of affective qualities.
T: Well, the PCE as the term is used by Richard and company and myself and Trent and so on and so forth is entirely devoid of it. It's only when the PCE devolves temporarily or just disappears comlpetely... devolves temporarily into what's termed an "excellence experience" which is the closest that you can come to being in a PCE without being in one. There is an affective quality there, it is the affective quality that most suitably imitates what human experience is like absent of it, sans that quality. Naivete, as Richard puts it is the closest a feeling being can come to innocence. These are terms that are quite common to our language yet are being used in very particular and, to some, peculiar ways, so I'll just define that quickly. Innocence is the utter purity of the PCE. It is the absence of any sense of 'right' or 'wrong,' there's no way to know what's right or wrong, there's just what exists, there's no conflict.
D: That sort of language is going to throw some people, maybe say it in a way that doesn't imply some sort of functional immorality.
T: Well, there's no ill will whatsoever, so theres no need to counter that ill will by forcing good will, by having good will that can be displaced. The good will that is inherent in a PCE isn't even a self-conscious one, though with adult sensibilities I know what's going on, I've lived a life that was so different from this that I recognize that, being here now, I don't have a malicious bone in my body, I don't even know where to find one. It just seems like the really obvious thing to do. It seems so sensible to live like this, that any other way, viewed from this perspective is at least slightly abhorrent...
[Daniel laughs]
To possibly incredibly absurd and bizarre and Kafkaesque, and not in a nice way.
D: That leads nicely to the resistance that comes up to this stuff which is a topic on which you have many good things to say. So talk about the resistance you encounter and some of your commentary on that, because I think that's a valid thing to talk about.
T: Oh man, the resistance, it's like, Mara only had 10 armies.
[both laugh]
This is like a global assault. From things like "your repressing your humanity" to "your killing your humanity" to "your a robot" to "your in denial" "your deluded"
D: "Cult follower"
T: "Cult follower," right, right, at some point it may be "cult starter"... let's see what else... just "misguided," ignorant, I think I've already said "deluded," that one comes up quite a lot, "pathological" that's another one. All because, it just seems really obvious to me, that I don't have to be irritated about anything ever. There's nothing to worry about, ever. There's nothing to fear, there's no one to get mad at, there's nothing to get upset about, in any which way, whatsoever, ever. And, in the absence of that, there's a whole lot marvel at, there's a whole lot to look at with nothing less than wide-eyed wonder.
D: Still you function just fine, you just traveled around the world, you're applying for graduate school, you're studying for your GRE. You navigate the world just fine without all of that, apparently.
T: Yea. Let's see, is there anything that I don't do quite as well... I don't know, argue with people, get upset, try to get people to like me... um...
D: So maybe I should talk about what little part I had in creating some of the resistance to this stuff, I worry that somehow I've created a little bit of a problem...
T: Oh yes, this is all your fault.
[both laugh]
D: No, this is definitely not all my fault but one small contributing factor to the resistance to this, which I think I should own up to here, and this is going to be strange for people who have read my book and heard me talk and have heard various aspects of my take on things. All one can do is one's best to describe what one has experienced and what one knows. What I attained that I called arahantship which still had the attention wave meaning I could still get nanas, I could still get jhanas, pure land, nirodha and et cetera so forth which was very centerless and very luminous and very empty and it's very transient it's very open field, it's very natural and it has all these amazing and excellent qualities which are true and i think there is something to be said for cultivating all that. What I didn't realize is that there seems to be one last cherry on top of the sundae or one last big point, and that last big point contradicts some central dogma or doctrine that I unfortunately seemed to have helped perpetuate. So I should go ahead and own up to that right now, and say I'm sorry, but more than that I should explain exactly what that dogma or doctrine is and how it's currently manifesting.
So essentially, from a pure vipassana practice point of view, it does make some kind of sense to meet all sensations regardless of whether they are, be they emotional, skillful, pleasant, unpleasant, whatever, with the same discerning eye that apprehends their three characteristics. This is excellent advice for those who want to attain to the insights that vipassana offers, which I think are an extraordinarily good idea by the way, and given how rapidly well-trained insight practitioners seem to get AF I still think it's a good idea in general. It provides a lot of foundation and good perspectives. The problem is that this excellent practice advice which also describes some aspect of the state of arahantship in which emotions, or things that seem like emotions, they're different in some ways, they have a lot of the same characteristics, there can be irritation there can be restlessness there can be sensations of fear.
T: They're no longer compounded the same way.
D: They're no longer compounded the same way, they are vastly more clearly perceived, vastly less sticky, vastly more like transient phantoms yet they still can arise. They still can arise in some way, as people who have read my "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" know. The problem here comes when one raises AF, which then seems to, inherently, contradict lots of the things that I've said, and in some ways it clearly does. So that's a problem, so now what's an excellent practice point becomes turned into something that then creates an inability to go forward, forward being to AF, which I have not yet attained, but as far as I can tell is an incredibly good idea, and having had lots of experience in the last five or six months with PCEs is a good idea and is attainable. And I think Tarin and Trent and the rest of these kids are not so barking crazy as everybody makes them out to be. In fact I think they are on to something profound and something extremely important.
T: And practical.
D: And practical. And doable, which is the nice thing. This stuff seems to be very doable. I'm slowly, with some missteps along the way getting better at integrating this point of view into my life. So we'll see how long it takes me to land it, anyway, the point is that this central dogma, which essentially is being represented as being "just fine" in heaven or hell or something like that, actually has a problem with it in that you actually can eliminate the hell part, so it seems. This is my working assumption at the moment, I can tell you when in PCE-mode, life is just fine. I have no need for nanas, I have no need for jhanas, I have no need for nirodha, I have no need for the pure land, I have less need for sleep, I feel extremely clear and here. It feels extraordinarily reality-based, I mean, the degree to which it is based on this reality is remarkable which I've always considered the gold standard for insight practice. Somehow even further tuning in to this reality freed of the distortion of the attention wave provides this remarkable clarity which seems to eliminate, as they so boldly claim, the affective qualities that create emotions. Having no emotions, or extraordinarily attenuated emotions in those modes I find just fantastic, and I seem to be able to function just fine if not even better at my job and life and everything. So I apologize for whatever dogma or doctrine I created, which seemed to be good practice advice and the time and described what me and some of my arahant friends were going through, yet seems now to be causing a roadblock to further progress, and that's my fault. So anyway, sorry, there it is. You want to say something about this?
[Dan laughs]
T: Yea, which is that there are also what could loosely be called ethical ramifications to consider as incentives for becoming actually free. Even without leaving the Buddhist framework, it can be looked at this way, that seeing things as they are the attainment of arahantship, seeing sensations as they arise and pass without sticking to anything, which is debatable, I mean, why are they arising if they're not sticking to something? I won't go into that just now...
D: Well you should go into that.
T: I'll go into that later, remind me.
D: I will.
T: Which is, which training is the first and the last? It's the training in morality. If it seems, for the sake of morality, for the sake of practical conduct in this world of people and things, if it seems like a good idea to go further, to go differently, than merely seeing things as they already are without changing anything other than "now you see it, before you didn't" then well, why not? To say that the completion of insight training is to come to this point and see things as they are is misguided, in a way, because the whole point of seeing things as they are is to do something about it.
D: Well, more than that, the quality of the attention wave which allows jhanas and nanas and insight training in and of itself is curiously distorting, so I can tell you when I seem to be in PCE mode and there is no obvious attention wave, anything... I'm now going to use the word attention in two different ways, [laughs] so there's ordinary attention which is just where you happen to be turning consciousness and there is this distorting factor of the attention wave which is this vipassanizing, sampling, transient thing that interferes with it. It's kind of like a carrier wave or a distorting, fluxing, phase problem. That distorting thing, when it is gone, reality is extraordinarily clear, in a way that it simply is not even in the best of any of the previous things I had ever attained. There is simply an undeniable, unarguable increase in the basic clarity of everything. A wonderful, stable, natural clarity to everything, from the sensation of air through my nostrils against the base of my skull, to visual sensations to whatever. And that clarity lends another level for our natural intelligence to function well,
just as in all the previous stages where you see more clearly and your natural intelligence hopefully functions better... So in this particulary way it does seem to deliver the nearly mythical, or so I thought, promised goods of eliminating affect, or in this case eliminating emotions entirely which is sort of different from what has come before, because it's usually a limited emotional range model where you eliminate the bad emotions and you get to keep the good ones. This, actually, we don't seem to see described anywhere, which is essentially you eliminate all emotions whatsoever. So maybe you should talk more about that.
T: What's funny is that's not actually a loss of any sort, because good emotions are a second rate version of this. They don't lend themselves to being seen as second rate, when your in the midst of them.
D: When that's all you know.
T: Yea, when that's all you know, especially when they're there, and there strong. You need to have a bit of a metta perspective, the capacity for it, to be able to understand this point, the point that every emotion is a message, it's trying to deliver something, it's trying to get somewhere. Every desire is an aim for fulfillment, this is that fulfillment, the fulfillment extinguishes the desire, this is not merely the absence of a desire through a beating it back, a denial of it, this is allowing a desire to finally become fulfilled.
D: By ordinary, sensate reality.
T: By ordinary, sensate reality. And as this is what has always been here anyway, this ordinary sensate reality, though it was not perceived as such, "I" realize that desire is unnecessary because what "I" always wanted, consciously or unconsciously knowingly or blindly, contrivedly or instinctively, intuitively, is available already, so desire just *poof*, I just *poof*.
D: So based on that sort of investigation, this is a lot of advertising and round-about description, maybe we should talk about methodology, given my eternal emphasis on pragmatism. So in terms of how to attain this, because the emotion thing does sort of lend itself to doing this which is where one learns to cultivate the PCE and one learns to figure out the roots of affective emotion at all so that allows one to seem them in a way such that they diffuse and manifest less, such that the PCE can naturally manifest more, and how to tune one's mind to that, but since you taught me how to do this I'll let you talk about it.
T: Alright, well, first off, you can't really go about this by thinking of it as a means to eliminate emotion, this isn't that. The elimination of emotions happens as a necessary consequence to the elimination of being, of this feeling of presence, of this sense of "I" of subject. Which, through insight practice, through mystical dis-embedding, disassociating, whatever, becomes just part of the sensate field, and is no more and no less than any sensation of anything else this causes the very binding which causes there any sense of there even being a self in any way, shape, or form, that is felt to be one it causes that to simply vanish.
D: The basic equation being the feeling of being creates affective feelings and without the feeling of being at all, simply no affective feelings will arise.
T: Yes.
D: So this being the standard, if you're going to talk about a standard for AF and a high standard... the danger with any of these things is they will get watered down and people will say "oh I do that" but the high standard for AF, as I understand it, because I haven't done it yet, is that there is no affect whatsoever, ever again, have a nice day, any emotional quality at all. No somatic charge or twang or resonance from any image or sound or sensate input.
T: Not that I have been able to pick up, even once.
D: Yea, and Trent describes the same thing. So, back in terms of methods, maybe you should talk about methods to cultivate the PCE and various ways to go about doing this so people can get a taste for what this is like and see for themselves.
T: Well, the way Richard wrote it, and that's what I had to work with, until I experienced a PCE of my own, is to ask yourself, "how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?" The asking of this question is... you can't really contrive an answer to this, it defeats the purpose if you do, you ask in order to find out. You ask "how am I experiencing this moment of being alive?" as a long and drawn out way of asking "how am I feeling?" "how is it right now to be here?" "what is this like?" You're getting a sense of what the quality of your experience is, in this very moment, here and now. There's actually a split-split second, just when you ask that, that is of the same quality as the split-split second
when a sense percept, like a bit of vision strikes the eye, a sound strikes the ear, thoughts, words occur, proprioception occurs, tactile perception occurs, things on the skin, the warmth, the air, there's this immediacy, this directness, this clarity for a split second, that when you pay attention to things in that way you get a taste of and when you ask this question you get a taste of. Now, getting a taste of it, by asking yourself this question is useful because it looks at what the nature of experience is like. But this little brief taste is difficult to pick up, so more likely than that the answer will be a feeling of some sort like "oh, I feel restless and irritated" or "oh, I feel great right now, I feel fine" or [in a convincing 'concerned' voice] "oh, I feel so tender and warm, and, I don't know, my thoughts about this person that I'm very very attached to..." I'll feel this kind of 'fuzzy feeling.' Any of these feelings at all adequately answer the question, now, the thing to do, because the idea here is to induce a PCE, is to figure out how it is that this is not a pure consciousness experience, how do I get to a pure consciousness experience from here? Now, if you already know what a pure consciousness experience is like from your own memory, your own cognitive memory rather than affective memory, because you can't remember how it feels, you can only remember how it is, without that feeling, association, relating aspect of memory, if you already know then you'll be able to then just by remembering you will start to make your way back there from here. You'll see how that is clearly, clearly preferable to this in the same way that a fork stabbed into a piece of food, going into your mouth, is clearly preferable to a fork stabbed into your eye or your hand
[Dan laughs]
It's just like that.
D: It's just obviously better.
T: It's just obvious, it doesn't take any kind of illusion or delusion or ignorance to know that one is better than the other, it doesn't take any kind of attachment or whatever else.
D: Simply discernment.
T: It's simply discernment, and so discerning thus, you can proceed. However, if you do not know what a PCE is like and you only have descriptions to go by, there are ways to try to get yourself to remember one we'll go into that later if I remember to, but I think it's worth knowing that there is an aspect of the way one feels which is closer to the PCE than other ways that one can feel.
D: Talk, maybe, about grooving on the sensate wonder of just being here, because those are some of the instructions I found the most useful, when you were talking about how sights just caress the eye, sounds just the ear, air and contact just caress the skin, that sort of simple, very bodily, "flesh and blood" to use an AF phrase thrown around a lot, those are the things that I found helpful, and your way of saying it I found helpful, so maybe you could do some of that.
T: Alright, I'll see what I can remember of what I said to you months and months ago. In a conversation I never thought I'd have to repeat.
[both laugh]
D: This is back in February when he had gotten it, he had been in Australia with Ricky and crew, and I flew him out because I was so impressed and had him talk to me for a few days about this stuff.
T: We spoke on the phone for about 45 minutes and Dan got it, just from the things I'd said, that there was something to be had here. So I came out here for two days or so, and I guess I talked about how there's this natural resonance in sound that is right at the ear. It's not like I'm hearing something out 'there' wherever 'there' could be, it's all just right here. I'm seeing with the eye, it's not I'm seeing through the eye, it's like I am the eye seeing. This is seeing. It's pleasant, it's very obviously pleasant to just experience what this body experiences. If this body were to experience pain it would also be painful. But, this experience here is friendly? for lack of a better word, is safe, is secure, is still, time doesn't move, there's no sense of there being anything abstract which moves or which I am moving through. There's just this world, yes the sun rises and sets, the planet rotates, it goes around the sun, so I understand.
D: It's all a little abstract bring it down to right here.
T: Oh, I thought I was being right here.
D: Oh.
T: I mean the sun does rise and set.
D: Sure.
T: Your moving right now...
D: But in terms of how that relates to getting a PCE.
T: Well, something that Richard pointed out, maybe it was Peter, his friend Peter, one of them anyway, pointed out how the second hand of a clock moves, but this isn't time moving, this is the second hand of a clock moving, moving, moving through space. And, I understood, it was just really clear, how there is movement, but there is nothing which moves, in the sense that there is the illusion that there is something ultimate which moves is absent, is vanished. So if you can see that there is a kind of restlessness, a desire, a movement, which feelings impelling or compelling in some way and you can see how that's just not applicable, it may vanish, before your very eyes or more likely when you just happen to be looking somewhere else, and you won't be able to find it, this sense of urgency, this sense of restlessness.
[pause]
D: So, other ways to get into a PCE, other modes... so let me talk a little bit about some of my experiments. This is sort of a vipassana thing, if you're able to perceive the wiggling of attention that creates the cycle of the nanas, clearly attention sort of wiggles and focuses in some way. When I hit the arising and passing away then I shift out dissolution then there's fear, misery, and disgust, they have there resonances. Then there's desire for deliverance, which has it's own field-distorting quality and things I look at are not clear unless I look at the periphery and that's irritating. Then it opens out to equanimity and things seem spacious and the attention wave is wiggling. To actually watch how the attention wave distorts a simple thing, like a simple image on paper or the image of your hand in the visual field, to watch that distortion, if you can try to see the thing without any kind of distortion or attention wave at all, just tune in purely to what the attention wave which is creating nanas and jhanas and those sorts of focuses is creating, and instead just to tune into the simple fact of visual or auditory reality. Just to see things being here in the most ordinary way, like before you did insight training, the way you thought everything was here but couldn't actually perceive it to be here. This is the sort of attention-mode which I have found the most helpful, just letting-sensations-be-ness, letting-them-show -themselves-ness, for flashing on to PCE mode. You might want to talk about cultivating felicitous feelings.
T: Yes, yes, that's extremely important! The number one thing standing in the way of an aspirant, someone who wishes to do this is a deep-seated underlying sense of resentment, that can be easily characterized as the feeling of not wanting to be here, not wanting to have been born. There is this cynical view, this outlook, that is extremely common. I experienced it so much of the time without realizing it and I look around me now and it is clear as day that the vast majority of my fellow human beings are operating on this routine, are living this, are expressing this in their every day lives, constantly, persistently... And that does mean, probably, you listening to this right now, if you can catch what it is to feel resentment, to feel resistance of any sort, this is what I'm talking about. If you are able to see this and are sensible enough, pardon I don't mean to be offensive in any way, I'm just speaking frankly, are sensible enough to see that you would enjoy being here so much more, if only you were more willing to enjoy it, then it would make perfect sense that the hesitation, the lack of consent, the unwillingness, the resentmennt towards and about being here is completely the opposite direction, and you don't want to do that.
D: In that same way, the gravity that the PCE has is remarkable, once one is able to see it and identify it and notice it's qualities. Gravity meaning that it has this amazing pull, because in comparison to it everything else seems distorted, dull, prone to irritation, restlessness, fear, confusion, those sorts of things. Noticing the automatic pleasant wonder and and gentle niceness of abiding in the sense spheres just as they are operating in this ordinary, yet very clear and direct way... When one sees that, then one goes "oh wait a second, that really is better" then that has a lot of pull. So just to see what this stuff is talking about, if you're interested in why I or anybody would suddenly be so interested in it, cultivate a PCE one way or the other and just see. Then go "oh ok, what is this actually like? what does this actually seem like? what are its qualities and aspects?" then you can see "oh, there really does seem to be this absence of all sorts of unfortunate emotional aspects." Then it will fade, it will dissolve I suspect then you'll have to do it again and you can get into this think where you're like "how do I get back into PCE mode?" but even that shows something to be said in what all of this is pointing to. So I would really recommend, as a meditation or mind-tuning experiment to see if you can tune the mind in a way that has no attention wave at all where the sensate world is just showing itself, completely undistorted by anything that looks like nanas or jhanas or any of that. Instead it's just cleanly and pristinely presenting itself, in that sort of way.
T: With regard to felicitous feelings though, if you are rather out of the gravity of feeling resentful but have yet to be grabbed by the somewhat different gravity of but have not been grabbed by the somewhat different gravity of being drawn toward a PCE, you are in this, more or less, free-floating territory. You can just take your feelings and desires whichever way, you can fritter them away on petty and meaningless desires which provide no real meaning or fulfillment or long-term reward or you can try taking the advice I'm about to give, and maximize the felicitous feelings. The Actualis method isn't merely about minimizing the harmful, the invidious, the malicious, the sorrowful feelings, the fearful feelings, and the antidotal pacifiers the tender feelings, loving feelings, compassionate feelings, the antidotes to malice and sorrow, respectively.
[end of part one]
