Tightness and narrowing, as qualities of emotion, are what the dog feels in the first place as a lack of safety. The sensory perception tightness is another issue entirely and is not relevant.
Attention freed from emotional qualities is what is ideal for problem solving. Narrowing of attention is just an emotional antidote to the emotional restlessness which prevents concentration in the first place.
The excitement enjoyed in the process of completing a challenging task that one is emotionally invested in in a limited timeframe is just a weak excuse for the immense sensory experience of aliveness that arises when one is completely free of any urge for anything to happen beyond what is happening already.
If yes, worry itself is still the one thing standing between someone and their destiny[1] of complete satisfaction and peace.
I have experienced the former (complete and total absence), but I don't yet experience it in all circumstances. I have experienced the latter when I used to be really into meditating and developing that spacious awareness.
No, instead the ability to act and live in total relaxation, delight, and spontaneity. Being *here* in total peace but with the ability to add all kinds of bonuses of sensory enjoyment on top of total peace and ease. I remember one time going on a hike where I started out worrying about some work I had to do by a deadline. Eventually when I had decided that it was more important to be in peace I started experiencing life with very minimal emotion for the next 5 hours or so. I spent the rest of the day just moving playfully about from one activity to another, and when I did decide to do some of the work there was no sense of compulsion or nervous energy that I *had to* finish it, so it was just like more play. That is the kind of life that I only shoot for when I am very daring and willing to risk the tolerable status quo of ocassionally using anxiety to force myself to do unlikable tasks.

Not as I have heard about it. It seems to be more about the inadequate peace (of course they don't quite say that, instead they say it is the best that is possible in this life, though it is incomplete) that comes about when you distance yourself from your emotions and see them as non-personal. It seems to be about pasting a veneer of perception that 'all is well' on top of the deeply held intuitions that all is not well.

[1]what the most essential part of them is aiming for

Was Richard able to live that and be an example of that in his day to day habits?
Kinda sounds like it would only work if every single person did it, otherwise would those who did it be then the victims of those who didn't? 
Yet Richard did not get a reputation for benevolent kindness..
I don't agree with that, IMO, an altered state of personality is still you and your identity as much as any other state you may sometimes be in.  People feel and act differently in different situations is all. 
You can put any labels on that you want, that does not change who you are. 
Same things goes the other way, if you have not experienced nondualism, then you can't really understand what it entails. 

Ok I think we are misunderstanding eachother again. Seriously - red flag - you seem to have read me in a way I totally didn't intend.

When I was referring to physical tightness and narrowing of attention I was referring to emotional experiences in general. I did not say that the worst thing that I experience is a "split second" of narrowing of attention but narrowing of attention in general. Sometimes it is hours of narrowed attention and physical tightness and that is much worse than a split second. My point is that emotions are the most unpleasant part of my experience of being alive, and I have had more success at making my experience better through feeling happy/harmless than through changing the way I perceive those unpleasant emotions.

What I was basically questioning is whether you are actually ok with the phenomena of physical tightening and attention narrowing.

Bill you seem to be assuming I am putting my own baseline experience forward as a way of experiencing that has less stress than yours. I really am not... I experience plenty of anxiety and stress and my purpose of this whole conversation was to discuss what is a complete solution to those difficulties.

Maybe you are saying that we can't discuss what I see as the complete solution to those problems until I have achieved it as my ongoing experience? I am ok to wait until then... not sure when it will happen though. You suggested you were interested in my experiences and I am giving them to you while admitting they are not what I eventually want them to be. Perhaps what you are really interested in is talking to someone who is actually free?

p.s. I think you are correct that I have been insincere in this conversation. Mostly through projecting more confidence than I actually have. To some degree I have been trying to communicate what is written on the actual freedom site, but I have also been passing it off as my own thoughts and experiences more than it actually is.

I would just say that if one is going to fire the guns, it's more effective if you first make sure you know your current environment and understand the target well.  Otherwise you get wasted bullets and collateral damage.  (which I think you sometimes do get).  In this case, he has already said has not obtained the Actualist goal of no emotions full time, so that makes it reasonable that he will sometimes feel normal emotions in normal situations.  And I think that calls into question your accusation on integrity.  I personally have not gotten the impression that he has made any deliberate lies.  As to lies we tell ourselves, I am not sure anyone is entirely free of them in all aspects all the time.  There is hallucination and delusion as part of this world, I think.  And I think we all have our stories and belief systems, just that some have more elaborate ones and cling more tightly to them than others.  I think in your case, one of your beliefs is that you are the one that will call it like it is when others won't.  Which according to my belief system means that it would be good to be extra careful in what you decide to call to make sure you have it right first.  If you call incorrectly often, I think it dilutes others' perception of your own integrity.  (not to mention that it's also mean!)
-Eva

    

Seems that there is quite a bit of variation to what different people experience as nondualism.  I wonder what the commonalities are across experiences.  What I've seen is more like that Jourdain perspective, but I don't experience it full time, just once in a while.  I experience it more often now, and the times between are differnet now so I feel more confident in talking about it.  I had been trying to figure out if it was nondualism since the descriptions by others varied so much, it was hard to know, and I was wondering if it was PCE instead (not that there is any agreement on what those are either).  But looking at the Jourdain quote, I can see a connection with when they say 'In the seeing, just the seen.'  From Jourdain, the feeling I got was, he feels he sees the real world through uncluttered eyes.  If the perspective is delusional, the world you see is also delusional.  With his nondualism, he feels he can then see the world truly as it is, or at least that is my interpretation of what I read from him.  

Plus I agree there is that thing where, and this is hard to describe, a division in perception and perceived is gone that once was there.  Perceptoin seems more immediate and direct as if a space that was inbetween is gone so the two are sort of closer or faster or more direct or something kind of like that.  Not sure I can line that up clearly with the whole watcher/seer/backdrop terminology though, but I have not spent much time studying that terminology either. When I started this long ago, I started it with the angle of just more of a psychology repair process, analyzing and fixing thought processes that were not useful or productive, learning to feel better, etc, just basic psychology IMO.  When they describe Actualism, it's actually a lot like the process I was using and that process did a lot for me and worked for a long time in ways that might be considered expected.   I did not have any special belief systems about it though other than in my mind, I was trying various tactics to fix my baloney and enjoy life more, kind of typical goals for many.  I also did have an interest in the esoteric but no specially strong belief systems about it. 

In recent years, my belief systems have spun away from what the current stated belief systems of Actualism are, but for the basic method itself, I still use it daily and it still seems to carry me forward, a kind of inward analysis and acknowledging of thought processes throughout the day.  Once my goal was to no longer feel pain and suffering, I think that is a basic conscious goal of most people, and I followed that conscious goal for a long long time.  But towards the end, I started to understand that pain and suffering taught me much that I would not have learned otherwise and I started to see the beauty of both sides of what I think are the same coin, and that joy can't exist in this world without suffering and that the suffering is not that different from beauty, once you come from that perspective, then you can be happy about even a bad thing, knowing that its job is an important one, a perspective I could have never understood previously. That's why people don't sit and watch a 2 hour long movie about people sitting on clouds strumming harps, because it would be boring.  If people TRULY want happiness so much, why do they watch movies and TV full of stress, violence, sadness, tension, mishaps, misunderstandings, etc?  People consciously say one thing but their actions say another.  Understanding why that is I think can be an interesting path and one that I am still walking on. 

If the nondualism thing becomes more stable for me, maybe I'll have more understanding of the rest of the explanations of it, right now as of recently the strongest thing about it besides the refreshing lack of unneeded mental chatter is a very strong sense of how all kinds of things are connected to eachother thoughts, events, etc.  A bunch of things seem so obviously easy to see when I'm in that mode compared to normal so I am not sure where that will go either.  But meanwhile, I often wonder how much similarity there is between nondualist experiences, could they be very different with only a few similarities?  I also do wonder if the Actualist method will take people exactly where the Actualist belief system says it will or if maybe it will take them to an even more interesting place!  Are there Actualists that have made it to pure no emotion full time all the time that can be a good case study?   Certainly there are people who have said that Actualism has helped them, and I have not heard any cases where it seemed to have hurt anyone, so for that alone, it would seem to be interesting.   
-Eva 

So this is the definition of PCE?  I have not seen one written down anywhere. 
Perhaps just with different easier terminology that the average person can understand without thinking too hard.  Buddhism could take some lessons.  ;-P  
Makes sense given all the philosophers over the centuries and given the thousands of years of monstrous diversity that has developed in Buddhism, I think it's unlikely that an entirely completely new set is of ideas were out there that had never ever been ever thought of before. 
Yep, tribalism, we humans do so much seem attached to it!  (Because my tribe is newer, older, better, smarter, faster, bigger, smaller, richer, more artisanal, dresses better, has cooler holidays and an older old tome, and has a better jade statue and gong than YOUR tribe does!)
-Eva