Actualism is not about paying attention?

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Not Tao, modified 9 Years ago at 10/28/14 8:52 PM
Created 9 Years ago at 10/28/14 7:43 PM

Actualism is not about paying attention?

Posts: 995 Join Date: 4/5/14 Recent Posts
Hey, so this thread is mainly directed towards Beoman, but other people can reply.

Here's a long quote:

What ‘I’ did, all those years ago, was to devise a remarkably effective way to be able to enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive each moment again (I know that methods are to be actively discouraged, in some people’s eyes, but this one worked). It does take some doing to start off with but, as success after success starts to multiply exponentially, it becomes progressively easier to enjoy and appreciate being here each moment again. One begins by asking, each moment again, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’?

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.

(...) Being ‘alive’ is to be paying attention – exclusive attention – to this moment in time and this place in space. This attention becomes fascination ... and fascination leads to reflective contemplation. Then – and only then – apperception can occur. An apperceptive awareness can be evoked by paying exclusive attention to being fully alive right now. This moment is your only moment of being alive ... one is never alive at any other time than now. And, wherever you are, one is always here ... even if you start walking over to ‘there’, along the way to ‘there’ you are always here ... and when you arrive ‘there’, it too is here. Thus attention becomes a fascination with the fact that one is always here ... and it is already now. Fascination leads to reflective contemplation. As one is already here, and it is always now ... then one has arrived before one starts.

The potent combination of attention, fascination, reflection and contemplation produces apperception, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. Apperception is an awareness of consciousness. It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. Apperception – a way of seeing that can be arrived at by reflective and fascinating contemplative thought – is when ‘I’ cease thinking and thinking takes place of its own accord ... and ‘me’ disappears along with all the feelings. Such a mind, being free of the thinker and the feeler – ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul – is capable of immense clarity and purity ... as a sensate body only, one is automatically benevolent and benign.


Now, I've heard you say that actualism isn't about paying exclusive attention to the senses. Can you explain to me how that deviates from this set of instructions? I've been floundering a bit in my practice, not really having many PCEs, so I re-examined what I was doing back in May when I was spending almost all day every day in the PCE, and I was, essentially, paying exclusive attention to "nowness" or just bringing myself back, again and again, to being here now - especially when any negative emotions came up. I was calling it "the escape hatch," actually. I'm going to start doing this again for a while, so I'll let you know how it plays out, but I'd just like to hear your commentary on this since you've met Richard personally and have been practicing this for a while longer than me.

EDIT: I've been reading your emails with Richard on the AFT, and I think I see the point you're making. You talked about how insight meditation caused you to turn your affective feelings into physical sensations through a kind of repression.

I noticed that, thanks to many months of training myself to do so following the advice written in MCTB and given to me by the DhO participants, is that I had reduced everything to physical sensations – touch, sight, sound, etc., with thoughts thrown in as well (though there was debate as to whether thoughts can also just be reduced to one of the five senses).

Thus, when I felt something unpleasant in my body, or some persistent tension, the only recourse, meditatively, was to put my attention on it, and notice it as being ‘impermanent’ (that is, as according to MCTB, vibrating in real-time at a certain frequency), ‘not-self’ (that is, as according to MCTB, happening on its own without a ‘self’ involved), and ‘dukkha’ (that is, according to MCTB, unsatisfactory in some fundamental way). The affect itself is taken completely out of the picture. It is noticed, but it is noticed strictly as a physical sensation, and the solution is to do something about that physical sensation. Here is where entering altered states of consciousness helps as it made the psyche more readily able to do something with those sensations.

However, I had always noticed that if I was distracted by doing some work or being engrossed in a movie or engaging in a conversation or simply doing something fun, the tension would disappear. It would only come back when I went back into my default meditative state. Of course, the advice was so pathological as to indicate that one should be meditating in some manner even during such activities.

I did do so to a large degree but I could never bring myself to do it 100% because I knew that those persistent tensions and unpleasant feelings were being accentuated, if not caused, by that very meditation. So, although I would tell people that I was ‘always meditating’, which was somewhat true in that I was almost-always cultivating an altered state of consciousness, I would still distract myself quite often to get away from the pain.


The idea of "paying attention to the senses" then is vastly different from "be here now." The practice that led me to the ongoing PCEs in May was different from what you describe here (though I also have experience with this exact method you outline and had the same results, as we've talked about in other threads, haha). I was attempting to draw my attention back to that sense of timelessness - or the awareness of being here now - specifically because it instantly (relatively speaking) dissolved the affective feelings I was experiencing. I called it an escape hatch not because of suppression, but because the appreciation and interest of the here and now would make the feeling seem frivolous and I could easily let go of it.

Reading your text here, I wonder if you were really practicing insight meditation the same way other people are. I've never seen it described quite like this, though I have seen people give advice on here to pay attention to how emotions feel in the body.
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Beoman Claudiu Dragon Emu Fire Golem, modified 9 Years ago at 10/29/14 11:03 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 10/29/14 11:02 AM

RE: Actualism is not about paying attention?

Posts: 2227 Join Date: 10/27/10 Recent Posts
Not Tao:
Hey, so this thread is mainly directed towards Beoman, but other people can reply.

Sure thing. By the way, I'm not sure if you know about this or if I didn't already invite you, but there is a yahoo group dedicated to discussing actualism and actual freedom, if you're interested in posting in a more actualism-specific (and actualism-friendly) place. Here's the link.

Not Tao:
Now, I've heard you say that actualism isn't about paying exclusive attention to the senses. Can you explain to me how that deviates from this set of instructions? I've been floundering a bit in my practice, not really having many PCEs, so I re-examined what I was doing back in May when I was spending almost all day every day in the PCE, and I was, essentially, paying exclusive attention to "nowness" or just bringing myself back, again and again, to being here now - especially when any negative emotions came up. I was calling it "the escape hatch," actually. I'm going to start doing this again for a while, so I'll let you know how it plays out, but I'd just like to hear your commentary on this since you've met Richard personally and have been practicing this for a while longer than me.
[...]
EDIT: I've been reading your emails with Richard on the AFT, and I think I see the point you're making. You talked about how insight meditation caused you to turn your affective feelings into physical sensations through a kind of repression.
[... snip explanation ...]
The idea of "paying attention to the senses" then is vastly different from "be here now." The practice that led me to the ongoing PCEs in May was different from what you describe here (though I also have experience with this exact method you outline and had the same results, as we've talked about in other threads, haha). I was attempting to draw my attention back to that sense of timelessness - or the awareness of being here now - specifically because it instantly (relatively speaking) dissolved the affective feelings I was experiencing. I called it an escape hatch not because of suppression, but because the appreciation and interest of the here and now would make the feeling seem frivolous and I could easily let go of it.

Okay, initially I was basically going to repeat what I wrote to Richard in that email. If you pay exclusive attention to the senses, you're ignoring emotions, and that is going to lead to ASCs, not PCEs. And the extra you wrote about the escape hatch does help to clarify a bit. It sounds like it's more in the right direction (though note what I said on the other thread about timelessness). Now even with that in mind, I'll still go through the instructions you quoted and show how it is mostly about feeling felicitous, and that paying attention to being here now involves being attentive to feelings until that point where you're in a PCE.

What ‘I’ did, all those years ago, was to devise a remarkably effective way to be able to enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive each moment again (I know that methods are to be actively discouraged, in some people’s eyes, but this one worked). It does take some doing to start off with but, as success after success starts to multiply exponentially, it becomes progressively easier to enjoy and appreciate being here each moment again. One begins by asking, each moment again, ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive’?

So note here the goal is "to enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive", and he's talking about the way in which to do that. The way is to ask yourself how you're experiencing this moment of being alive, because that gets you to pay attention to how you're feeling, and so if you're feeling unhappy or sad or whatever, you notice that sooner and can get back to feeling felicitous sooner.

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.

So here it's enjoying and appreciating being here that leads to the PCE, not paying attention in a particular way. To the extent that your "escape hatch" leads you to *enjoy* being here, that's to the extent it helps lead to a PCE. And it is really enjoyable to contemplate that it is always now, that the past and the future aren't actual right at this moment, etc. Note that when not in a PCE, enjoying and appreciating are affective states - *feeling* happy, *feeling* harmless.

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.

Again note it's the enjoyment and appreciation that marks the wide and wondrous path, not paying attention in a particular way.

[These are all feelings, this is not perfection personified yet ... but then again, feeling perfect for twenty three hours and fifty nine minutes a day (a virtual freedom) is way beyond normal human expectations anyway. [...] One starts to feel ‘alive’.] Being ‘alive’ is to be paying attention – exclusive attention – to this moment in time and this place in space. This attention becomes fascination ... and fascination leads to reflective contemplation. Then – and only then – apperception can occur.

I've re-inserted part of the first paragraph that you snipped out, to indicate that it's still emotion-based at this point - feeling perfect, feeling alive. But here I start to see your point about attention. With the caveat that I am less certain about this part than the previous parts, I'll attempt to continue. First I'll note that at this point the actualist is already feeling perfect - so the stage set for this paying attention is already really enjoying the heck out of whatever is happening. Maybe what Richard is getting at is this feeling of perfection leads to the feeling of being 'alive', and feeling 'alive' is to be paying exclusive attention to now... so maybe it is that the result of enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is to be paying exclusive attention to now? That is: you are enjoying *what is happening*, you are not stuck in the past or in the future or what's happening now but on the other side of the world. In order to maximize the enjoyment of what is happening, you have to be paying attention to what is happening, and to nothing else. And that leads to fascination - for example, fascination that it is always now. But this attention is intrinsically linked to enjoying and appreciating what is going on. I might also argue that part of what is happening now, when not in a PCE, are the felicitous feelings, so one is feeling felicitous and appreciating that one is feeling felicitous as well. One isn't just feeling sad and then straining their attention to focus only on what's around them, for example.

An apperceptive awareness can be evoked by paying exclusive attention to being fully alive right now. This moment is your only moment of being alive ... one is never alive at any other time than now. And, wherever you are, one is always here ... even if you start walking over to ‘there’, along the way to ‘there’ you are always here ... and when you arrive ‘there’, it too is here. Thus attention becomes a fascination with the fact that one is always here ... and it is already now. Fascination leads to reflective contemplation. As one is already here, and it is always now ... then one has arrived before one starts.

I think this part is clearer - it's paying exclusive attention to being "fully alive right now", which I think includes those feelings of felicity. Note again that Richard said one starts to feel alive as a result of feeling perfect (feeling happy and harmless to the nth degree).

The potent combination of attention, fascination, reflection and contemplation produces apperception, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. Apperception is an awareness of consciousness. It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. Apperception – a way of seeing that can be arrived at by reflective and fascinating contemplative thought – is when ‘I’ cease thinking and thinking takes place of its own accord ... and ‘me’ disappears along with all the feelings. Such a mind, being free of the thinker and the feeler – ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul – is capable of immense clarity and purity ... as a sensate body only, one is automatically benevolent and benign.

And I'd summarize this as saying, that combination of noticing what's going on right now and enjoying what's going on right now and being fascinated that it's always now, is what leads to the PCE.

---
Not Tao:
Reading your text here, I wonder if you were really practicing insight meditation the same way other people are. I've never seen it described quite like this, though I have seen people give advice on here to pay attention to how emotions feel in the body.

Well, of course nobody who currently thinks it is a beneficial thing to do would describe it that way. Notice for example, every once in a while someone will post that they've begun feeling tension when they meditate, and that usually it goes away but sometimes it persists for an hour or two after they stop. That's the seed for the tension I describe there. If you really take it on board and meditate 24/7, then that tension will persist 24/7. But the tension will go away when you're not meditating, just as I describe. Also I'm not sure if Daniel ever said this explicitly but Kenneth certainly did, that emotions are thoughts plus physical sensations. To understand an emotion as just thoughts plus physical sensations is to ignore the core part of the emotion, namely the affective part.
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Not Tao, modified 9 Years ago at 10/29/14 2:27 PM
Created 9 Years ago at 10/29/14 2:27 PM

RE: Actualism is not about paying attention?

Posts: 995 Join Date: 4/5/14 Recent Posts
Something I notice is that, once I am truly certain that the emotion I'm feeling isn't useful, I can come back to "nowness" very easily.  If I'm stuck in the idea that an emotion is necessary, I need to understand it before I can come back because it will keep drawing my attention.

I believe I'm past the hump where I see any emotional reaction as useful now, though, because I can identify them very quickly and see how the PCE mind could solve the same issues (probably better because it isn't distracted). What happens afterward is what's been giving me trouble. Acceptance (or neither repressing nor expressing) works somewhat, but it isn't reliable because I still feel myself focused on the feeling itself. Often it will strengthen it or make it worse before it gets better, and I find myself ruminating. The missing link seems to be that, when acceptance is tied in to paying exclusive attention to "nowness," I'm allowing myself to forget about it completely and it is just gone without a trace.

BTW, I didn't mean to snip anything, I was quoting from one of Richard's emails where he must have snipped that himself.

That is: you are enjoying *what is happening*, you are not stuck in the past or in the future or what's happening now but on the other side of the world. In order to maximize the enjoyment of what is happening, you have to be paying attention to what is happening, and to nothing else. And that leads to fascination - for example, fascination that it is always now. But this attention is intrinsically linked to enjoying and appreciating what is going on.


Yes, by simply realizing that it is already now, and being here in this nowness, I feel instantly drawn towards remaining here with my attention. I remember back in May I was actually using negative feelings as a warning that I wasn't paying attention because feeling good had become so standard.

One isn't just feeling sad and then straining their attention to focus only on what's around them, for example.


If I am feeling sad, and I come back to now with the sadness, the sadness just goes away on its own. I can combine this with logical thoughts about how the sadness isn't really useful, and it seems to work better because I can compare the feelings to the ambiance of the world as it is and see that they don't really represent it well.

And I'd summarize this as saying, that combination of noticing what's going on right now and enjoying what's going on right now and being fascinated that it's always now, is what leads to the PCE.


Yes, exactly. I don't think you have to wait until you're felicitous to be here now, though. For me, being here now creates felicity. It's so easy, and it's always there anyway - it just seems like I need to remember that I'm here now. Any straining seems ridiculous once I actually notice I am already here. It's like something extra added on and it's easy to drop it. It's like, I can't NOT be here now, so the only thing that's really happening is I'm ignoring the fact that I'm here now. So there's noting extra to do - as in straining to be here - but rather something to stop doing - as in ignoring I'm here and latching on to some mental image.

It isn't very spectacular, but there is some quality of the PCE you can tap into instantly. It's like a clarity, or a simple understanding of the "realness" of what's around you. I remember I first saw this quality after I'd been thinking on my couch trying to figure out how time worked. I just suddenly realized there was no time I could perceive - it was just always now. It's a very ordinary thing to see, but it's basically what the PCE is made of, no? By combining that with acceptance of the emotional state, it just removes the attention from the internal world completely - and then there's the PCE.
Jeremy May, modified 9 Years ago at 10/29/14 4:57 PM
Created 9 Years ago at 10/29/14 4:57 PM

RE: Actualism is not about paying attention?

Posts: 191 Join Date: 8/12/14 Recent Posts
There are many different methods that must be employed to bring people to what you are understanding.

It is as if each individual needs a very specific Key, dhamma, picture, to wake up to their true Buddha-selves.

You expound such beautiful Dhamma that I am now asking certain people to look for your words.

They have become perfect!

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