Actual Freedom – Mailing List ‘D’ Correspondence

Richard’s Correspondence On Mailing List ‘D’

with Correspondent No. 33

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December 26 2012

Re: Better phrasings...

CLAUDIU: Just wanted to drop in and say it’s good to see you writing again! I do find I benefit from your continued correspondence and wanted to point that out explicitly as it’s clear that not everybody on this mailing list does.

RICHARD: Thank you ... it does indeed make for a change to not only be reading adversarial feedback.

RESPONDENT: I just wanted to say that I’m also finding your writings quite helpful. I’ve been practicing the actualism method since about when Claudiu visited you earlier this year. Claudiu and I have been corresponding quite a bit since then and we seem to be on the same page.

RICHARD: G’day No. 33, I certainly appreciate your supportive words.

It is indeed pleasing to know of an added benefit to be obtained from Claudiu flying half-way around the world and back (which is, in itself, quite an undertaking) such as to make his endevour even all the more worthwhile.

RESPONDENT: My life has improved immensely since I stopped meditating and starting practicing the actualism method 100% and I think I’m very close to, and possibly living, a virtual freedom (same way of being) right now. If 1% of a day is about 15 minutes, then I’m definitely spending 99% of my day feeling good for about a month or so now. I can definitely see how my days could be even better, however, so I’m not too eager to claim virtual freedom just yet.

RICHARD: That is quite a turnaround in such a short time (6-7 months) and is a clear refutation of some naysayer’s absurd claim that ‘actualism does not satisfy the scientific method’. (Message No. 11994).

Obviously, the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom does indeed deliver the goods right here and now (and not off into some indeterminate future) inasmuch success after success can certainly multiply exponentially such as to be repeatable almost on demand.

RESPONDENT: I don’t really tend to write in these forums as the members do tend to be mostly adversarial ...

RICHARD: Ha ... after 30+ years of mostly adversarial responses it has all become par for the course; so-much-so it is always quite a surprise whenever it be otherwise.

Howsoever, right from the beginning (when first online in 1997) it has been a breeze to meet all objections to being happy and harmless, all opposition to peace and harmony, all resistence to a global spread of peace-on-earth in this lifetime.

Even a cursory glance through the archived correspondence shows how not even one objector, not a single opposer neither a lone resister, has been able to poke a hole in actualism/actual freedom.

On the contrary, they have to make stuff up so as to have something to find fault with ... thus magnifying, for all to see, just how perfect actuality is into the bargain. Vis.:

• [Respondent]: But since I’m not here, as you are, to impress or save face ...

• [Richard]: I see ... you re-present some (doctored and/or mis-represented) un-referenced quotes, making certain allegations, and when I reply, setting the record straight, your response is to classify same as ‘to impress or save face’ [...].

[...] This may be an apt moment to point out that, as there is not all that much difference between saving face and having egg on it, I have always found it pays to be well-informed before mounting a critique. Moreover, the more that certain persons doctor and/or misrepresent my words and/or read things into them which are simply not there, and so forth, in order to find fault the more they demonstrate that what I do report/ describe/ explain is indeed actual/ factual and, thus, irrefutable (else why resort to it). As such a sterling PR service for actualism is being provided ... gratis. Richard, The Actual Freedom Mailing List, No. 87, 28 October 2004

RESPONDENT: ... and not helpful to my goals, and this thing seems to require a lot of figuring it out on one’s own and actually doing it (as opposed to simply discussing it/thinking about it). The information is out there, and the method is clear, so there’s not really a lot I feel like asking you or posting about here on the group.

RICHARD: Aye, it has all been said, umpteen times over, and is freely available on The Actual Freedom Trust website.

‘Tis fun to be writing again ... although, for moment or two at the start, it seemed as if I might have lost the knack (insofar as I always prefer it when the words flow from the fingertips, surprising me with what appears on the screen, rather than being a craftsman).

RESPONDENT: These have been the best months of my life.

RICHARD: Quite probably you do not realise just how much those words are music to my ears.

Regards, Richard.

January 13 2013

Re: Neither Expressing Nor Repressing Posted

RESPONDENT: Richard, I’m wondering about ‘Neither Expressing Nor Repressing’ an emotion when it arises. On the AFT (.../richard/audiotapeddialogues/betotallyridofemotionsandpassions.htm) you wrote:

• [Richard]: ‘By neither expressing nor repressing emotions, something new can happen. The emotion is put into a bind, it has nowhere to go. Next time anger, say, comes up in a situation, simply decline to have it happen. Observe it as it gets up to all kinds of tricks to have its way. Do not express it – but do not repress it either. Watch what happens ... you will be surprised. Personally, I rid myself of anger in about three weeks when I started on this all those years ago. The more subtle variations like getting peeved, getting irritated and getting annoyed took a little longer, but losing my temper in an angry outburst ended after about three weeks.
I kid you not. It all has to do with the determination to succeed, with patience and diligence born out of the pure intent garnered from a peak experience.
You just know that it is possible to be peaceful because you have seen it for yourself. One will do whatever is required to be that experience, twenty-four-hours of the day’.

A few questions I have are:

1. By ‘do not express it’ do you mean only to not act it out (by, for example, making snide remarks to a partner when irritated) or do you also mean catching various thoughts that are arising from having the emotion and not getting caught up in those as well (for example thinking about losing your job or various other bad things that could happen to you which are coming up because you are afraid)?

2. By ‘do not repress it either’ do you mean to feel fully the various twangs, tensions, driving forces, etc. that are characteristic of the emotion in question. For example if I am angry, there is a very characteristic ‘flavour’ that can be felt in the body. These felt aspects seem to impel me to think various angry thoughts and act in ways I wouldn’t if I wasn’t angry.

So basically, if I tune into the felt aspects I refer to in question 2 and simply see the emotion in question for what it is, I am no longer caught up in it and something new comes into view. As you say it goes into a bind. My concern would be whether I am misunderstanding you and am heading in the wrong direction. This approach tends to lead in a very nice/sensuous direction and has lead to me experiencing PCEs so I think I’m getting you but wanted to be sure.

RICHARD: G’day No. 33, In regards to your first query, ‘not expressing’ does indeed refer to thoughts/ thinking, as well as actions/ behaviour, and to not have either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feelings fuelling thoughts (feeling-fed thinking), as well as no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feelings fuelling actions (feeling-impelled behaviour), is to have all of the affective energy channelled into the felicitous and innocuous feelings (the happy and harmless feelings).

Needless it is to add, surely, that happy and harmless thoughts inspire felicitous and innocuous behaviour (both in word and action).

Regarding your second query, ‘not repressing’ – or, being more technically correct, not suppressing – essentially refers to societal mores (‘acquired customs and manners’), common to all cultures, whereby civil discourse and commerce hinges upon keeping all emotions/ passions strictly under control (as in suppressing what one truly feels, in any given situation, for the sake of communal harmony).

However, your observations about ‘felt aspects’ characteristic of the emotion in question – characteristic ‘flavours’ which are, you say, felt bodily – are also well worth discussing, albeit later or via another thread, as what you are referring to is known as hedonic-tone (the affective pleasure/ displeasure all experiences, including all states and all emotions/ passions, are automatically/ involuntarily imbued with, by virtue the affective faculty itself/ the feeling-being formed thereof being existent/being in situ, per favour blind nature’s quite basic instinctual attraction-repulsion survival package).

Thus the conventional wisdom is to suppress the affective feelings – to suppress, in fact, virtually all impulses, drives, urges and appetites – and the (resultant) therapeutic wisdom is to express the affective feelings.

*

And then, in the late-afternoon of an otherwise typical summer’s day, in 1981, a six-foot-two man was standing in the kitchen of his ex-farmhouse being soundly berated, as was also typical, by his four-foot-eleven wife; he was in a bind, a double-bind, in fact, and of his own making insofar as he had formed the intent, a few weeks earlier (on the 1st of January), to live life as it had been in their all-too-brief honeymoon period a little over fourteen years previously; his intent to do so was formed as a way of having it segue into the pristine purity of the four-hour perfection experience, indelibly imprinted in his memory, which he had experienced in all its marvellous wonder in the mid-winter of the previous year; his wife, having impetuously agreed that day to travel in concert with him, had already succumbed to the same-old same-old and was out to have him crack, too, so that their life together could revert to normal (having put all that pie-in-the-sky romantic nonsense back where it belonged in the wishful-thinking department).

As he stood there, with the slowly-setting sun streaming yellow through the wide-open French doors leading out onto the brick-paved patio, he was quite aware that a similar scene had taken place only the day before, plus how he had managed to keep his act together only by the exigency of abruptly vacating the scene, until the barely suppressed anger she had invoked in him had subsided enough to return; he was acutely aware, also, that she had his number and, as far as she was concerned, it was only a matter of time before he too succumbed to the same-old same-old; and as he stood there he was uncomfortably aware that the same anger of yesterday was rising, slowly but inexorably, from the solar plexus up toward the rib-cage diaphragm.

There was no way he was going to suppress it – he’d had a lifetime of the failure of the ‘stiff upper lip’ approach – and he was damn’d if he was going to express it, either (for then this four-foot-eleven female would have triumphed over this six-foot-two male yet again); the vision of having to vacate the scene once more – and again and again off into a sombrely-looming future – was not at all an attractive option, yet, if all else failed, he supposed he could always make the unseemly dash to the door.

Thus he stood there still, despite feeling the anger rising ever upward, through the rib-cage diaphragm, and now suffusing the thoracic region with its all-too-familiar temptation.

And he could see her eyes begin to gleam, even through the wrathful glare which had transfixed him all the while, and he just knew she was zeroing in for the kill; his own anger was mounting, ever-simmering and seething it was brimming at the region of the lower throat by now; her face was flushed with purple, with nostrils quite distended, and spittle flecked her livid lips as her shrilling rose to fever pitch; he had left it too late to beat a hasty retreat and his throat muscles quivered as the brimming anger shimmered and shifted into a pre-shout mode born of old and ... and, wonder of wonders, that oh-so-familiar throat-muscle quivering skipped a beat or two and began to ease!

With a rapidly-mounting amazement and delight, he marvelled at the fact that he had, in some way, neither suppressed nor succumbed and that he had finally freed himself of domination by this four-foot-whatever fleshly package of seething anger and hatred that had become the mother of his and her children.

And as the slowly-setting sun streams golden from the west another world entirely hoves into view.

Pristine and pure, ever-fresh and new, peerless perfection permeates all and sundry, without exception, and he knows with a certainty that his life is never going to be the same ever again.

Ain’t life grand!

Regards, Richard.


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