October 23 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

Perhaps there were some beliefs around these feelings in the past but it seems that they have kind of become automated at this point, in that even in the absence of the belief the habitual feeling persists. So looking at the gloomy feelings yesterday evening there was a few which were connected to each other but they were not related to any beliefs or values. It was varying feelings of despair, panic and insecurity. They would be triggered periodically like a case of chronic back pain and would bounce from one to the other. But they have no rhyme of reason to them, there is the habitual feeling triggered by association and that is it.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

I think you answered this in your next post – those feeling may well have to do with your new discovery that your “number 1 priority” is to have “a favourable place”, being “a someone in relation to others”. Therefore your “varying feelings of despair, panic and insecurity” are most likely be related to this newly revealed priority.

KUBA: So how does one go about tackling these kinds of habituated feeling patterns? They are quite sticky in that when they come they have this ability to compel and yet at the same time I can see they are over nothing substantial. It’s like ‘I’ am not done with ‘being’ that feeling yet although ‘I’ have no ‘good reason’ for it other than habit. I could trace them to an event or thought, but other than that there was nothing more in terms of any social identity aspects which were behind it, just habitual feelings. It’s like someone flinching at the sight of a stick if they have been hit with one enough times.

VINEETO: What it seems like to me, is that the best way to approach these is to continue to experience them fully without moving in either direction, and when I do this usually within some short time the feeling is indeed exposed as just a habituated affective pattern. Then some time down the line it repeats again, just by sheer force of habit, but it does seem like that habit is being chipped away at each time I experience the feeling fully, see it for what it is and get back to feeling good.

Before you proceed to “tackling these kinds of habituated feeling patterns” you may have to first find out which direction you want to proceed given that in your next post you said that “those 2 goals are mutually exclusive”.

*

KUBA: Aha well I can tell you what it is now Vineeto, with a high degree of confidence.

And those 2 goals are mutually exclusive, enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive and ‘earning my place’ within the group.

VINEETO: I appreciate your sincerity.

This is a significant discovery. You presently give priority to your “wish to claim a favourable place” to be “a someone in relation to others” as “especially important”. This is indeed contra to wanting to diminish ‘me’ via becoming increasingly happy and harmless. It looks like you will have to find out if this priority is of lasting importance by proceeding in the direction of your desire (“wish”) for “a favourable place” (perhaps the top?) in a particular group.

KUBA: As such I have never put everything on a “it doesn’t ultimately matter” basis, one of the key things Richard did when first stepping onto the wide and wondrous path.
So yes this does already explain the different results for ‘Kuba’ and ‘Richard’.

VINEETO: Indeed it goes some way to explain the different results. Your discovery also explains your recent objections to leaving humanity, to exploring naiveté and exquisite intimacy, and to moving from conditionally feeling good to feeling good unconditionally. It could also explain those “habituated feeling patterns” or “any particular beliefs, values, fantasies” concerning this desire (“wish”) which you mentioned in the previous message. Your “high achiever”, as you called him, apparently wants to achieve something more in a previously unexplored arena.

Richard: Put succinctly: the actualism method will not work as advertised when treated as being a materialism method. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Rick-a, 6 March 2006).

Cheers Vineeto

October 24 2025

KUBA: So seeing yesterday the outline of ‘me’ as a group member I was fascinated, what I could see is that ‘me’ as a group member is not a new invention at all, it is actually a very ancient part of ‘me’. It looked that it flows directly from the instinctual programming, as can be seen in some animals e.g. monkeys, but furthermore it was the predominant MO for the longest chunk of time that the human animal has been in existence, namely as hunter gatherer tribes. The story of ‘me’ as a group member is the story of ‘humanity’ itself.

How I experience it since this morning is that the gateway to pure intent has been opened up, of course as it is something entirely new to human experience and ‘the old’ has to get out of the way in order to allow it. My experiencing is that of a pristine purity which is just at the fingertips, and something has changed in ‘me’ in that there is less in the way of it, there is like a tingling excitement at the experience of it and the fact that ‘I’ can now allow it, what a blast!

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Well, it sounds like you have come to your senses, at least for now, but the ‘proof of the pudding’ will be when those “gloomy feelings” and those “varying feelings of despair, panic and insecurity” from yesterday are also gone.

And then you said this only the day before –

Kuba: Hmm ok I see the bottom line of this is that I am not willing to change myself. This makes a lot of sense, why I would rather go on excursions, because then I get to remain intact as I am now and fool myself into an escape fantasy.

But to feel good each moment again for the rest of my life I have to change myself. Which is also why only returning to feeling good is insufficient. Am I understanding correctly?

In that me as I am now (if I was to remain like so) will forever experience those same ebbs and flows, I will remain in the 60/40 arrangement because this is what I am willing to allow.

Is this objection still prevalent, causing you to go back and forth between having a blast from a short-lasting insight and then “gloomy feelings” again or has the objection of “not willing to change” yourself miraculously evaporated? It will have to be lived to find out.

I do ask because having observed this see-saw between serious objections, shared “with a high degree of confidence” and a sudden change of mind only to be replaced by another objection makes me quite dizzy to follow, and I wonder if I better stay on the sidelines for a while until this merry-go-round has calmed down.

I am pleased, however, you re-discovered pure intent. It makes such a difference in how you assess any upcoming objections, either passionately believing in them all or letting pure intent give you an actual perspective instead.

Cheers Vineeto

October 25 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

My best regards until then.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

It bears well that you now know which direction you want to go.

My experience is that one has to dissolve any persistent obstacles and objections affectively not only cognitively, with the sincere intent to imitate the actual, in order for them to reliably dissolve. When you keep this in mind you can’t go wrong.

Best regards Vineeto

October 28 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

VINEETO: It bears well that you now know which direction you want to go.

KUBA: Yes I do indeed and solidly from experience too, over the weekend and today I have been delighting in this mirificent flavour, I am glad that Claudiu got me onto this word but if not I would say it is a magical fairytale like flavour, this sense of endless wonder and amazement – “how can the universe exist, how can all this be so” etc.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Ah, Richard was equally delighted when he found the word and created a long list of definitions and samples of literary use for it (Richard, Abditorium, Delight, #Mirific). It appears in a lot of dictionaries but is rarely used.

KUBA: With the immediate reward being the wonder and amazement itself rather than any intellectual answer. I am amazed each time this flavour is tasted because it is just as wondrous every time. This flavour, what it is and where it leads is the direction I want to go in, and not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. It is what I want to do with my life. And there is a golden clew in place now back to this flavour, and it is so very worth it every time.

Those obstacles are there – to be squarely addressed rather than gingerly walked around – but now there is such a worthy goal, and such a pinpointed attention to it that I am confident it is possible to proceed.

VINEETO: It’s wonderful you now have access to this flavour of “the wonder and amazement itself rather than any intellectual answer”. Intellectual answers are never successful in the long run standing against any onslaught of instinctual passions, whereas “wonder and amazement itself” are very potent and ultimately irresistible.

You and Sonya seem to have infected each other with the joy and fun of considering obstacles “to be squarely addressed rather than gingerly walked around” – it needs a bit of daring at first but once your abandon your pride and acknowledge that ‘you’ are as bad and as mad as the person next door, then the fun of addressing any obstacle to feeling excellent begins, and as I said to Sonya, nothing succeeds like success, “and it is so very worth it every time”.

By the way the terms ‘as bad and as mad’ comes from Peter –

Respondent: What follows below is, I think, Peter, a nice example of your freedom of the need to justify yourself and to identify the character flaws of other people as opposed to your own absence of such flaws.

[‘Peter’ to No 60]: One of the major problems with having pet peeves ... <snipped for length>(see here)

‘Peter’: I have had this criticism levelled at me many a time before but it simply makes no sense at all. I have always been upfront about the fact that ‘I’ was as bad and as mad as any other instinctually-driven being on the planet.

Again from (the very first page) of my Journal –

[‘Peter’]: ‘As I sit on the balcony of our small flat contemplating life, I am moved to start writing my story. The urge has been welling in me over the last few months, so I’m now making a start. There is now ample time, given that I have all but retired, to reflect on the sense I have made of life.

Indeed, that has been the innate drive in my life: to make sense of this mad world that I found myself living in. The insanity of endless wars, conflict, arguments, sadness, despair, failed hopes and dreams seems endemic. *And worse still, as I gradually forced myself to admit, I was as mad, and as bad, as everyone else.* I had tried all of the solutions that Humanity offered in order to be happy, but in the end they made no sense and haven’t worked to sort out the mess.’ [emphasis added] (Peter’s Journal, Foreword).

Acknowledging that I was ‘as mad and as bad as everyone else’ was the starting point of my realizing that I needed to change – that I needed to become free of malice and free of sorrow if I wanted to be harmless and if I wanted to be happy.

Such as simple matter-of-fact acknowledgement, the necessary prerequisite for change to happen, is what is sometimes colloquially known as ‘getting off one’s high horse’. (Peter, Actual Freedom List, No. 89)

KUBA: Oh and the other thing I can see now, the morning resentments and the evening gloom, these feelings were there as a result of me walking down the path which I know cannot deliver the goods. It’s because that flavour would be already gone, and then I would be going through the motions of the ‘real world’, knowing that it leads nowhere. There was always this sense to those feelings like ‘what is the point of all this’ and indeed what is the point of living anything but that which delivers the goods, especially when that thing has already been located.

All of those feelings as well as the “high achiever” who would come in to assuage them, none of this is of any relevance when I am allowing that mirificent flavour. And at the same time nothing at all in the ‘real world’ can make up for what is missing when that flavour is lost.

VINEETO: Ah you recognized what caused “the morning resentments and the evening gloom” – according to Geoffrey’s metaphor “being lost in the woods nearby”. Naturally that also means you were not “spending the day-time in paradise”, they were feelings of a conditional happiness or perhaps good feelings. This paradise was a real-world paradise, not actuality or near-actuality. I can say this with confidence because if you had spent the day in actual “paradise” you would not have experienced “the evening gloom” and “morning resentments” day after day. The meaning you were looking for was not in the day-time “paradise”, those feelings ended when the conditions/ activities causing your happiness ended. As you said yourself – “it’s selling out”.

Now that you found the genuine flavour, the “mirificent flavour” of pure intent, you know what you had been missing.

It is from the ongoing experience of the actual world that Richard says –

Richard: Aye ... when ‘I’ willingly self-immolate – psychologically and psychically – then ‘I’ am making the most noble sacrifice that ‘I’ can make for oneself and all humankind ... for ‘I’ am what ‘I’ hold most dear. It is ‘my’ moment of glory. It is ‘my’ crowning achievement ... it makes ‘my’ petty life all worth while. It is not an event to be missed ... to physically die without having experienced what it is like to become dead is such a waste of a life. In an ecstatic moment of being present, ‘I’ expire. ‘I’ am extirpated, rubbed out. ‘I’ cease to exist, permanently. Something irrevocable takes place and every thing and every body and every event is different, somehow, although the same physically; something immutable occurs and every thing and every body and every event is all-of-a-sudden undeniably actual, in and of itself, as a fact; something irreversible happens and an immaculate perfection and a pristine purity permeates every thing and every body and every event; something has changed forever, although it is as if nothing has happened, except that the entire world is a magical fairytale-like playground full of incredible gladness and a delight which is never-ending. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Mark, 18 May 1999).

Some people objected to his standard of the actual world – perfection –

Respondent: I once stated that I thought that actualism had a ‘dark underbelly’. This was largely due to a host of negative adjectives applied to being ‘normal’. For example, ‘the pits’, ‘abysmal state of affairs’, ‘petty life’, ‘pathetic’, ‘miserable’, ‘bad situation’, and so on. It is obvious to me that most ‘normal’ people don’t see it that way – which is why I thought you to be displaying the ‘dark underbelly’ that I spoke of.

Richard: It is life in the real-world (being normal) which has the dark underbelly – and thus, albeit sublimated and transcended, so too has life in the unreal-world (being abnormal) – not life here in this actual world ... the pristine perfection of the peerless purity the infinitude this universe actually is ensures nothing dirty (‘being’ or ‘presence’) can get in.

Respondent: It is helpful to take this all in context – and the context in this case is ‘compared to an actual freedom from the human condition’. My misunderstanding appears to have been based upon the fact that I didn’t notice the shifted standard.

Richard: There is only one standard (to use your terminology) here in this actual world: perfection.

Respondent: That is, ‘normal’ people usually have quite a different standard of what constitutes a good life than an actualist does. Is this a correct assessment?

Richard: Indeed it is ... an actualist settles for nothing less than the perfection evidenced in a pure consciousness experience (PCE). Hence my report, in the previous e-mail, that I could not deny that all the while I was both normal and abnormal there must be/surely was something better, far better, than either the ‘great life’ or the ‘glorious life’ – and thus I would not, could not, and did not, settle for second best – and that this is precisely what I am conveying to my fellow human beings: whatever you do, do not ever settle for second best.

For the best is just here, right now, where it already has been, all along, and always will be. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 27f, 24 October 2003)

KUBA: It looks like (and I don’t know when exactly) but I already signed the contract, in that I have already seen what is possible, so how could anything but that ever compare. I see now how for ‘Vineeto’ virtual freedom was never an indefinite platform to remain but rather a dynamic stepping stone to the ultimate.

VINEETO: Indeed, although ‘Vineeto’ had a long period when ‘she’ ran away from even contemplating going out from under control (the genuine virtual freedom). It was only ‘her’ determination not to “do a Devika”, and never to give up when the best was so obviously achievable (because of her own PCE and because Richard lived it day after day), that ‘she’ eventually dared, and cared, to stop running and leave ‘her’ fear behind in lieu of near-actual-caring.

KUBA: Of course ‘I’ would look for steeples within the ‘real world’ when that flavour was lost and yet knowing deep down it is pointless. Having experienced pure intent ‘I’ can never fully forget the experience, the wheels are in motion and ‘I’ can either kid ‘myself’ or press on.

So the warning, not to “do a Devika” this is relevant, it looks like at least I had my endless stubbornness that would never allow it.

VINEETO: Yes, “never fully forget the experience” of “wonder and amazement”, tie a golden clew to it each time you experience it.

And don’t castigate yourself for your “endless stubbornness” – more than likely it’s not only the deep fear of venturing into the unknown but also the fear of leaving behind everything which is dear/ familiar to you and common to all. And the moment you dare to look the fear in the eye, acknowledge its existence and refuse to be beaten, fear will instantly lose a large portion of its power (because fearing fear is feeding it) and then you can look for the thrill of the adventure of a lifetime.

It bears well indeed.

Cheers Vineeto

October 29 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

VINEETO: It’s wonderful you now have access to this flavour of “the wonder and amazement itself rather than any intellectual answer”. Intellectual answers are never successful in the long run standing against any onslaught of instinctual passions, whereas “wonder and amazement itself” are very potent and ultimately irresistible.

KUBA: Yes and there is this other side to it in that I am quite an intense person in the sense that the “cogs are always turning”, and the problem when looking for intellectual answers within the real world is that I only end up chasing those various steeples which are never satisfying anyways, on top of the fact that they never lead anywhere. Whereas when allowing that mirificent flavour it is like my natural inclination to be fascinated finally finds home and here it can flower fully, because the possible wonder and amazement is endless in both scope and depth.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Yes, a conscious change of habit might be useful – to remember and appreciate sensuousness and value the very act of appreciating the wondrous and amazing world around you as a beneficial and worthwhile activity – simply because this is what you want to do in your life, and not because anyone else praises you for it or gives you a badge of honour for it. To allow yourself to follow your “natural inclination to be fascinated”, don’t stop it in midstream, let it “flower fully, because the possible wonder and amazement is endless in both scope and depth”. It is indeed endless in scope and depth. Richard’s last article, ‘Marvelling how well-equipped human beings are’ can give you some extra perspective of wonderment.

KUBA: Then I don’t need to be looking for things to do, being here is that fascinating in itself, I remember this specifically when driving back from London the other day and looking at the vista all around, the trees have begun turning in colour and some had leaves that were almost red, other leaves were as if dancing in the wind in front of the car and we were comfortably making our way home with music playing. What Richard wrote then came to mind, that being here is an escapade in itself.

Even writing this I am amazed that such wonder and amazement is possible, and there was more because it was precisely around that time that an option presented itself to me, which was to allow this moment to live me. It was this naive wonder and amazement that made the option available, because ‘I’ was not required for any of this wondrous happening in the first place. I can understand why it has been written that “the sky is not the limit”.

VINEETO: Ha, you got the gist of it – will you dare to continue? Will you care to continue?

*

VINEETO: And don’t castigate yourself for your “endless stubbornness” – more than likely it’s not only the deep fear of venturing into the unknown but also the fear of leaving behind everything which is dear/ familiar to you and common to all. And the moment you dare to look the fear in the eye, acknowledge its existence and refuse to be beaten, fear will instantly lose a large portion of its power (because fearing fear is feeding it) and then you can look for the thrill of the adventure of a lifetime. [Emphasis by Kuba].

KUBA: Yes I think you hit the nail on the head here, this is why I have felt like I sold out too, because pure intent has been experienced and yet I could not bear to proceed through that potential fear of leaving all that is dear / familiar to me and common to all. In fact this summarises my objection altogether, this objection / fear is what stands between me and that which I want more than anything.

VINEETO: Yes, once in a while marvelling is not sufficient, it requires daring and caring to dare to continue on the path which will eventually leave behind all that ‘you’ hold dear, including ‘you’.

KUBA: So this fear of leaving the known behind it seems it can’t be gingerly walked around either, I mean that is what I have been doing for a long time with not much success. At the same time I understand from past experience that it is not to be pushed through in a sudorific manner.

VINEETO: Ha, “gingerly” walking around fear has never worked, neither does endless rational thinking and/or conceptualising or other strategic detachment manoeuvres.

KUBA: I actually have some good idea of what needs to happen this time around, it seems all those prior failed attempts did provide me with some valuable information as to what not to do. And you have also explained what can be done:

Vineeto: And the moment you dare to look the fear in the eye, acknowledge its existence and refuse to be beaten, fear will instantly lose a large portion of its power (because fearing fear is feeding it) and then you can look for the thrill of the adventure of a lifetime.

and

Vineeto: Yes, “never fully forget the experience” of “wonder and amazement”, tie a golden clew to it each time you experience it.

VINEETO: Excellent. And don’t merely focus on the fear either, stay with the amazing flavour of wonder. Only when fear interferes with enjoyment and appreciation, acknowledge fear’s existence and refuse to be beaten/ distracted.

Here I found a reminder what you (briefly?) already knew in November last year –

Kuba to JesusCarlos: The ‘difficulty’ in actualism is due to the fact that all that ‘I’ have learnt in ‘my’ life was an encumbrance. The ease in actualism is unlocked when one stops being sophisticated haha. (5 November 2024)

As you know, the opposite to being sophisticated is being naïve. And naiveté is a quality which, once re-discovered, can be cherished, fostered and become a new way of life.

Cheers Vineeto

VINEETO: In other words, when in a hole, stop digging.

Cheers Vineeto

October 31 2025

KUBA: Also what I noticed today is that the resistance ‘I’ put up is not to be pushed through, the resistance is when ‘I’ am not in agreement, it does have to be skilfully manoeuvred but I noticed that the wide and wondrous place is not so much past the resistance, it’s more adjacent to it lol. It’s when ‘I’ see the resistance for what it is ‘I’ am back on the wide and wondrous path.

VINEETO: No. The resistance can neither to be “be pushed through” (i.e. ‘me’ forcing ‘me’) nor can it “be skilfully manoeuvred” (‘me’ trying to deceive ‘me’). The result of this skilful manoeuvring is what you described in the post before this –

Kuba: “It appears that I am now in a similar if not the same place to where I was when you began writing on the forum”.

If with the wide and wondrous place you mean the “mirificent flavour of pure intent” then is not “adjacent”, it is outside of the entire real-world paradigm, where your “resistance” originates from. (see ‘fulcrum’ above)

KUBA: I was unclear here, yesterday when I went to teach BJJ I stumbled across that gloom and usually I would go into the gloom to try to resolve it or go through it, …

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Let me interject here in mid-sentence. “Go into gloom to try to resolve it or go through it” is not doing the actualism method. Noticing the trigger, getting back to feeling good and from there acknowledge, recognize, investigate if necessary, or nipping it in the bud (“consciously and deliberatively – with knowledge aforethought – declining oh-so-sensibly to futilely go down that well-trodden path to nowhere fruitful yet again”) are the tools of the actualism method, so that you can again enjoy and appreciate this moment – the only moment you are ever alive – instead of frittering it away by going through the gloom. When you are aware that you are your feelings then you choose which feelings you rather want to be – and why would you want to waste the only moment you are ever alive by being “gloom”?

KUBA: … whereas this time around I saw that it was a dead end and I went adjacent, towards felicity and innocuity instead. So what I was describing here was not so much resistance towards ‘my’ demise / one way trip, but rather a diversion into feeling bad.

VINEETO: Indeed, you already knew “it was a dead end” because you told me only three days ago –

Kuba: I can see now, the morning resentments and the evening gloom, these feelings were there as a result of me walking down the path which I know cannot deliver the goods.

Why are you then still even considering to walk down the same fruitless path of “go into the gloom to try to resolve it or go through it”?

KUBA: But your main point I never saw before, that pure intent is outside of both ‘me’ as well as ‘my’ resistance, hence it is the fulcrum.

VINEETO: I was contemplating if I had made too much of your word “adjacent” but it is obvious now that this clarification was entirely necessary. You are still attempting to imitate the actual by merely side-stepping a little bit in the direction of enjoyment, carefully avoiding to orient yourself “outside of both ‘me’ as well as ‘my’ resistance”.

“Adjacent” means “adjoining, neighbouring (on), next door to, close to, close by, bordering (on), beside and alongside”;
“Outside” means “exterior, external, independent, extrinsic, on the outside” (Oxford Languages).

Hence the persistence of “the morning resentments and the evening gloom” as “diversion into feeling bad”. The intention to step outside the compounds of the territory of ‘me’ is missing. So you can ditch all three aspects (“try to resolve it or go through it” and going “adjacent”) of your way of handling any emotions interfering with felicity and innocuity as avoidance and effectless and instead activate pure intent which is the fulcrum outside of ‘you’.

There is a vast difference between realisation and actualisation.

*

VINEETO: Are you ready to go for a one-way trip this time?

KUBA: I don’t think I can answer this with a sincere yes unless I am already on the one-way trip, what I am ready for is to abandon the old and proceed towards the new. Currently attending to the ebbs and flows seems to be the practical demonstration of this commitment. And what my focus has been on recently is that in order for the ebbs and flows (the conditional enjoyments and feelings) to be left behind, those outlines of ‘me’ responsible for them need to be abandoned also.

VINEETO: I appreciate your sincere reply.

Rather than trying to leave behind “the conditional enjoyments and feelings” why not change your focus to do what Richard suggested –

Richard: … consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is what the actualism method is. And this is because the actualism method is all about consciously and knowingly imitating life in the actual world. Also, by virtue of proceeding in this manner the means to the end – an ongoing enjoyment and appreciation – are no different to the end itself.

(…)

Once the specific moment of ceasing to feel good is pin-pointed, and the silliness of having such an incident as that (no matter what it is) take away one’s enjoyment and appreciation of this only moment of being alive is seen for what it is – usually some habitual reactive response – one is once more feeling good ... but with a pin-pointed cue to watch out for next time so as to not have that trigger off yet another bout of the same-old same-old. This is called nipping it in the bud before it gets out of hand ... with application and diligence and patience and perseverance one soon gets the knack of this and more and more time is spent enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive. And, of course, once one does get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy and harmless’ ... and after that to ‘feeling excellent’.

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. (Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive).

I copied a longer section for you because each re-read of the actualism method reveals where one has inadvertently added or subtracted text to make one’s own interpretation and thus missed something essential.

KUBA: So perhaps still proceeding towards advanced base camp first haha.

VINEETO: Why “perhaps”? Is this still your next aim? Feeling beings ‘Peter’ and ‘Vineeto’ have demonstrated that to live in a methodological, still-in-control virtual freedom is eminently doable and very enjoyable. Now that the Direct Route has been opened it is also an easy spring board to an out-from-control virtual freedom, if you wish.

You have some experience now with trying to do ‘shortcuts’ which revealed to be rather diversions, avoidance and delays. These attempts are more likely indicators of a basic misunderstanding about ‘shortcuts’ –

Respondent: I have (big) issues to sort out first before I will be able to make the leap.

Richard: As there is no ‘leap’ – an actual freedom is not a spiritual freedom – it would indeed appear so.

Respondent: I guess there are no shortcuts.

Richard: What I find telling – and this is a general observation – is just how much peoples object to being happy and harmless ... the vast majority of the correspondence in the archives is, in fact, a cutting indictment on the human condition itself.

Do you realise – and this is a personal observation – you have just said, in effect, that you guess you will have to become a happy ‘being’ before you can become actually free from the human condition (as if were there a way to be thus free without having to do so you would not)?

Whereas it is actually such a delight to finally be able to be happy (and harmless) ... and a relief. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 54, 27 November 2003).

Cheers Vineeto

November 1 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

My head is spinning a little this time, well there is 1 bit of your response which caught my attention though :

Vineeto: Hence the persistence of “the morning resentments and the evening gloom” as “diversion into feeling bad”. The intention to step outside the compounds of the territory of ‘me’ is missing. So you can ditch all three aspects (“try to resolve it or go through it” and going “adjacent”) of your way of handling any emotions interfering with felicity and innocuity as avoidance and effectless and instead activate pure intent which is the fulcrum outside of ‘you’. [Emphasis by Kuba]. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Kuba11, 31 October 2025).

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

It can be fortuitous that your “head is spinning” – you might be seeing if a major readjustment is in order. Let me respond here before you go on devising a new strategy to stop your head from spinning. I am going by your phrasing of “skilfully manoeuvring” your “resistance” in combination with “adjacent” in your recent message as in –

Kuba: Also what I noticed today is that the resistance ‘I’ put up is not to be pushed through, the resistance is when ‘I’ am not in agreement, it does have to be skilfully manoeuvred but I noticed that the wide and wondrous place is not so much past the resistance, it’s more adjacent to it lol..

I suspect (and I could be wrong) there is a stumbling block that you seem to have never taken squarely into account – that there is just no way that the actual world is “adjacent” [“adjoining, neighbouring (on), next door to, close to, close by, bordering (on), beside and alongside”] to ‘me’, the imaginary but very passionate alien entity inside your flesh-and-blood body. Therefore there is simply no way that ‘I’/ ‘me’ can devise a strategy (“skilfully manoeuvring”) to enter the actual world whilst remaining ‘me’.

Richard: To put it bluntly: ‘you’ in ‘your’ totality, who are but a passionate illusion, must die a dramatic illusory death commensurate to ‘your’ pernicious existence. The drama must be played out to the end ... there are no short-cuts here. The doorway to an actual freedom has the word ‘extinction’ written on it. This extinction is irrevocable, which eliminates the psyche itself. When this is all over there will be no ‘being’ at all. (Richard, List B, No. 13, 26 May 1999)

When you understand this basic fact, at the deepest core of your ‘being’, that the actual world, and therefore pure intent and all the wonderful experiences you had of the “mirificent flavour of pure intent”, is outside of ‘your’ domain then you won’t continue to fool yourself and end up “in a similar if not the same place to where I was when you began writing on the forum”.

I am reminded of something Richard wrote to Alan in 2016 –

Richard: (…) – such tergiversation [equivocation, evasion, prevarication, shuffling, and ambiguity (Merriam Webster)] reminds me of what feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ reported after the first few weeks of listening to me/ reading my words.

Speaking in regards to the effects any and all attempts to fit this totally new paradigm into ‘her’ existing mindset were having, ‘she’ explained the process as being ... (1.) as if ‘her’ brain was being turned upside-down ... and how (2.) ‘she’ was having to relearn how to think all over again.

Could it be a stage you have skipped, perchance, upon having jumped the gun? (Richard, List D, Alan, 29 February 2016).

Could it be that you inadvertently were trying to fit actualism into the spiritualistic paradigm for instance that it is enough to have realisations without ever needing to actualise them in a practical down-to-earth way to reap their benefits? Or into the materialistic paradigm that these realisations are merely a screen to present (to yourself as well as others), to hide that the true primary purpose, your ‘self’-survival, remains in power? It would only be natural given that ‘you’ are the instinctual survival passions therefore there is no need to be ashamed or embarrassed. And if this indeed part of ‘your’ modus operandi it would be both beneficial and liberating to discover so as to avoid future traps.

The reason I am saying that is because many times in the last months you have apparently gone to the brink of ‘self’-immolation, only to pull back with more doubts and more objections and then go again to the brink and backward again. For example –

Vineeto: Indeed, after all the frightening, thrilling and daring experiences, in the end you find out that there is “no-one at all stopping ‘me’ from setting ‘myself’ free” – isn’t that in itself a hilarious proof of the benevolence of the universe and the beneficence of the human consciousness, which enables such revelation. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Kuba6, 23 March 2025).

Kuba: I remember you wrote to me a while ago asking (to the effect of) – can you hear it yet? Indeed ‘I’ can now hear the sound of ‘my’ extinction approaching. (23 March 2025)

And finally conclude –

Kuba: “It appears that I am now in a similar if not the same place to where I was when you began writing on the forum”.

To further explain what I mean by actualisation – in a PCE ‘I’ go into abeyance and when ‘I’ appear again, ‘I’ am the same as ‘I’ was before the PCE – so any insights or understandings gleamed from experiencing the actual world remain impotent until ‘I’ actualise them by imitating the actual as sincerely and progressively as possible. For example, you can follow Geoffrey’s suggestion –

Geoffrey: … find it in yourself to take a first clear step in the right direction, such as making a commitment to happiness and harmlessness.
The door is wide as the universe, just as the path is by imitation. When one knows what it is one wants, and when one knows what it is one must sacrifice, then only the sensible action remains. [Emphasis added].

Here Richard describes in detail how ‘he’ actualised the information (and intent) gleaned from the PCEs –

Richard: As to how simple, easy and thus effortless this way of living/ this course of action is, when sincerely put into practice, it may be handy to also anecdotally reference how the identity inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body all those years ago took the first step, on what has become known as the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom from the human condition, as the new year dawned in 1981 and as the grandmother of ‘his’ four children was driving them all down the driveway of ‘his’ ex-farmhouse after having heroically elected to have all of her grandchildren stay with her in the city for a three week holiday (which had left ‘him’ and ‘his’ wife on their own together for the first time since the birth of the first child around fourteen years previously) so as to give her daughter and son-in-law a break from parentage and, hopefully in her mind, to be of assistance in the resurrection of their failing marriage.

It was an opportunity ‘he’ grasped with both hands to not only regain the honeymoon intimacy, of 1966, as ‘his’ wife was spontaneously proposing while they waved them goodbye as they drove away down the driveway – specifically, a twenty-hour mutual peak experience, which both of them remembered well, wherein naïveté featured prominently – but also by so doing to thereby enable the actual intimacy each had experienced, some months prior, during their respective perfection experiences which had indubitably evidenced to both of them that peace-on-earth was already always here (a much-discussed issue over those preceding months). What they both set about doing thereafter, consciously and with knowledge aforethought, was to deliberately imitate the actual each moment again – as magically manifested in their respective perfection experiences – simply because the imitative course of action had been demonstrably successful in the area of the fine arts (as per my oft-mentioned ‘enabling the painting to paint itself’ theme).

When their children were duly returned by an exhausted grandmother, after their three-week exposure to the big-city lifestyle had run its course, ‘he’ was particularly determined not to lose what ‘he’ dubbed the ‘honeymoon atmosphere’ by reverting to type – although ‘his’ wife fared badly in this respect (as per Message № 12901 (Richard, List D, No. 33, 13 January 2013) for instance) – and four weeks later as the official school year was due to commence ‘he’ was similarly set on not losing, as the minimal or bottom line of moment-to-moment experiencing, what ‘he’ dubbed the ‘holiday atmosphere’ (engendered via interacting with ‘his’ children as if a child again, albeit with adult sensibilities, due to an irrepressible re-emergence of ‘his’ hidden-away-during-puberty childhood naïveté).

For what ‘he’ had twigged to, in the beginning stages of their joint venture (and particularly exemplified by ‘his’ wife’s predilection for venting over voicing), was how it was far, far easier and simpler to stay in a good mood come-what-may – preferably a happy mood of course – than claw ‘his’ way back up to feeling good, again and again, after having habitually reverted to type.

Hence being (affectively) aware, each moment again, of more and more subtle variations in the quality of one’s moment-to-moment enjoyment and appreciation of being alive/ of being here so as to earlier and earlier pre-empt any potential reversion to type.

Also, repeated experience had shown ‘him’ that minor dips in that quality presaged each major diminution – indeed miniscule blips soon became evident even earlier than those minor dips as ‘his’ ability to (affectively) detect subtle variations in the affective tone of mood and temperament became evermore fine-tuned – and the earlier such habituated silliness could be (affectively) discerned the sooner ‘he’ could thus nip these instinctual potentialities in the bud.

And all this while ‘he’ worked 12-14 hours a day for 6-7 days a week, as already mentioned, and yet all this while such work increasingly resembled the play it is in actuality. (Richard, List D, Claudiu4, #actualise)

Allow yourself time to contemplate, which can increase your being ruthlessly honest and deeply sincere [true to the root] with yourself – which are the keys to naiveté. You know if you actualised some of your profound realisations when your daily life actually changes and the “outlines” that you mentioned two days ago noticeably and consistently change in one direction – more happy and harmless, gentle and kind.

Kuba: In that how could ‘I’ possibly agree to ‘my’ extinction if ‘I’ am not even willing to abandon those various outlines of who ‘I’ am.

KUBA: OK so I am not going through bits of ‘me’ and neither am I going adjacent to the bits of ‘me’. You are suggesting to have the intention to step outside the compounds of the territory of ‘me’. Well, the question that comes up is how? The mirificent flavour experienced over the weekend was indeed outside ‘my’ territory, it’s what makes the experience so utterly delightful and wondrous, it’s having the time of my life. The flavour was available because of something like a “holiday atmosphere”.

So the question is how to consistently “step outside the compounds of the territory of ‘me’” or how to make the “holiday atmosphere” a way of life. It seems it is naiveté that makes this possible, because only as a child was the world wonderful and magical as an ongoing experience or a way of life.

It’s interesting actually that as a child the world was magical and wonderful in itself, whereas later on as an adult one has to travel across to some holiday destination to maybe rekindle a tiny shred of that magical flavour and even then it is never quite the same.

You know there is this thing I have seen in computer gaming, where people keep asking for old games to be re-made believing that the games themselves were better back then, but actually what they are looking for is that sense of wonder they experienced whilst playing those games as children, and that flavour is never quite found again.

I actually have a lot of solid memories of the “wonderful world” of my childhood, and yes if I could live like that all the time that would be utterly amazing.

VINEETO: Kuba gave some good advice in January 2025 –

Kuba:

Richard: Okay … this is important, vital, pivotal: ‘I’, the thinker, know that ‘I’ cannot do it … ‘I’ cannot disappear ‘myself’. Only the ‘utter fullness’ can, and the ‘utter fullness’ is ‘calling one’, each moment again, and it is only when ‘I’ fully comprehend – totally, completely, fundamentally – that to be living this ‘utter fullness’ is to be living ‘my’ destiny will one be able ‘to answer that call’.

This full-blooded endorsement means it then becomes inevitable. (Richard, List B, No. 25f, 18 June 2000)

Allowing this “utter fullness” is indeed not about ‘me’ keeping busy, it is about ‘me’ becoming (or more specifically accepting that it has always been so) totally redundant, and agreeing to this with the entirety of ‘my’ being. When ‘I’ contemplate this possibility there is such an incredible sweetness to admitting this, it’s where release is located. (13 January 2025)

And being naïve is the way.

Cheers Vineeto

November 2 2025

VINEETO: I suspect (and I could be wrong) there is a stumbling block that you seem to have never taken squarely into account – that there is just no way that the actual world is “adjacent” [“adjoining, neighbouring (on), next door to, close to, close by, bordering (on), beside and alongside”] to ‘me’, the imaginary but very passionate alien entity inside your flesh-and-blood body. Therefore there is simply no way that ‘I’/ ‘me’ can devise a strategy (“skilfully manoeuvring”) to enter the actual world whilst remaining ‘me’.

VINEETO: When you understand this basic fact, at the deepest core of you ‘being’, that the actual world, and therefore pure intent and all the wonderful experiences you had of the “mirificent flavour of pure intent”, is outside of ‘your’ domain then you won’t continue to fool yourself and end up “in a similar if not the same place to where I was when you began writing on the forum”.

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

Whilst I consider the rest of your reply I do have a question. If the “mirificent flavour of pure intent” is outside of ‘my’ domain altogether then how is it that ‘I’ can experience it whilst naively enjoying and appreciating, is it that when the actual flavour is tasted ‘I’ am temporarily in abeyance? Because that flavour is nothing like in the real world, it is actual. Is it that when ‘I’ am being naive the possibility of briefly going into abeyance is as if always imminent and it can appear as if ‘I’ am the one experiencing actuality?

I experience being naive as a state of near-PCE, as if I am flickering between 2 worlds. But I guess what I am getting at, is it that when that flicker does happen and for that brief and delicious micro second there is the “mirificent (and actual) flavour of pure intent” am ‘I’ then also in abeyance? In a PCE it is clear that ‘I’ am in abeyance but when in the state of near-PCE it is this constant flickering that makes it difficult to pinpoint if it was ‘me’ that tasted the actual or if ‘I’ was in abeyance.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Thank you for your considered reply. It helps to clarify the nub of the issue.

When I look at the gist of those two paragraphs you explain why you have the impression that ‘I’ experience the actual world – which impression/ conclusion is what keeps ‘me’ firmly in existence. In other words, you interpret the experience from ‘your’ perspective. This view is what contaminates your intent because it appears to offer a comprise where ‘you’ can have it all, in other words you want to enjoy the experience of the “mirificent flavour of pure intent” but remain as ‘you’ are.

KUBA: I think this might be the unexamined misunderstanding which you are pointing to, that ‘I’ believe it was ‘me’ who tasted the actual and that ‘I’ can then re-arrange ‘myself’ to taste it again – which does not work.

VINEETO: Yes. When you have the experiences of “mirificent (and actual) flavour of pure intent” for “that brief and delicious micro second”, it is not enough to fully inform you of the nature of actuality and that the actual world is incompatible with ‘you’. Hence the intent to actualise, make permanent “that brief and delicious micro second” is not put into action. You have only asked me to categorize it, label it.

In comparison –

Richard: It was so blatantly obvious, when ‘I’ saw ‘myself’ for what ‘I’ was (a lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning social identity), that thought and feeling had no part to play ... because at the instant ‘I’ saw ‘myself’, an action that was not of ‘my’ doing occurred, and I was not that identity. It all happened of its own accord as a direct result of the ‘seeing’ ... and I was this very material universe experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective flesh and blood body being apperceptively aware. I was living in this fairy-tale-like actual world, that all carbon-based life-forms live in (and could be aware of if only they realised it), which has the quality of a magical perfection and purity; everything and everyone has a lustre, a brilliance, a vividness, an intensity and a marvellous, wondrous vitality that makes everything alive and sparkling ... even the very earth beneath one’s feet. The rocks, the concrete buildings, a piece of paper ... literally everything is as if it were alive (a rock is not, of course, alive as humans are, or as animals are, or as trees are). This ‘aliveness’ is the very actuality of all existence – the actualness of everything and everyone – because we do not live in an inert universe. The infinitude that this very material universe is, is epitomised apperceptively as an immaculate consummation that has always been here, is always here and will always be here. Thus nothing is ‘going wrong’, has ever been ‘going wrong’ and will never be ‘going wrong’. This was what ‘I’ had been searching for – for 33 years – and the joke was that ‘I’ had not known that this is what ‘I’ had been searching for!

Thus, when I reverted back to normal in the ‘real world’, ‘I’ knew, with the solid and irrefutable certainty of direct experience, that ‘I’ was standing in the way of the actual being apparent ... and ‘I’ had to go – become extinct – and not try to become something ‘better’. That is, ‘I’ just knew that ‘I’ could never, ever become perfect or be perfection. It was flagrantly evident that the only thing ‘I’ could do – the only thing ‘I’ had to do – was die (psychologically and psychically self-immolate) so that the already always existing perfection could become apparent. Naturally, there was a lot of thinking and feeling about it all – and discussion with one’s peers who all said it was not possible twenty four hours a day – yet there was an awareness that predominated all the while that disregarded all this thinking and feeling and which simply and wordlessly said ‘THIS IS IT’ no matter what conclusions and decisions were reached.

When one has experienced the best ... one cannot settle for second-best. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List B, No. 34b, 11 July 1999).

I gain the impression, from how you write, that the moment ‘you’ enter the arena after these micro seconds ‘you’ are still very much in charge and willing to interpret the experience as ‘your’ achievement, hence no urgency to do whatever you can to imitate the actual as much as you can. For ‘you’ to take action, this clear understanding, this life-changing insight, that “‘I’ was standing in the way of the actual being apparent” needs to be experientially and unquestionably obvious. Realisations and “delicious micro second” experiences don’t seem to do the trick for you.

KUBA: I think the crux of what I am getting at is – is apperception only possible when ‘I’ am in abeyance, no matter how briefly? And ‘I’ only have a memory of the flavour, yet ‘I’ never taste it ‘myself’? In fact ‘I’ have never tasted the “mirificent flavour of pure intent” at all.

VINEETO: There are excellence experiences where ‘I’ am still present –

Richard: ... the term ‘Excellence Experience’ comes from my third wife’s experience (who is meticulous in grading her experiences so as to not befool herself into thinking something is happening which is not actually the case) on Australia’s most easterly headland one bright and sunny morning where she initially described it to me, while it was happening, as being “not quite a PCE”.

Then, while gazing intently at a group of tourists on a lookout platform further below, she observed how it was such an excellent experience anyway, despite not quite being a PCE, it would henceforth be slotted into her then-scale of ‘good’, ‘very good’, ‘great’ and ‘perfect’. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List D, No. 7, 16 November 2009, tool-tip)

And to distinguish the difference of excellence experiences to a PCE –

Richard: The most outstanding distinction in the excellence experience is the marked absence of what I call the ‘magical’ element ... in a PCE one is fully immersed in the infinitude of this fairy-tale-like actual world with its sensuous quality of magical perfection and purity where everything and everyone has a lustre, a brilliance, a vividness, an intensity and a marvellous, wondrous, scintillating vitality that makes everything alive and sparkling ... even the very earth beneath one’s feet. The rocks, the concrete buildings, a piece of paper ... literally everything is as if it were alive (a rock is not, of course, alive as humans are, or as animals are, or as trees are). This ‘aliveness’ is the very actuality of all existence – the actualness of everything and everyone – for one is not living in an inert universe.

Gary: In hindsight, the description of the PCE fits the bill, with the magical, fairy-tale like quality. The excellence experience may be more common to me lately that I hitherto thought. In the excellence experience, there is a commonness to it not found in the PCE.

Richard: Ahh ... good, I am pleased to have feedback that shows this to be a facet of experiencing that more than just a few people have so far reported. It all helps to clarify and aided communication.

Gary: In the PCE, there is a clear sense that something of momentous importance is happening, at least it seemed that way for me.

Richard: Excellent ... words conveying what ‘momentous importance’ conveys are words such as what I look for in a description, for it is no little thing what one does/ what we are doing. What is conveyed is what impelled ‘me’, all those years ago, into proceeding with the utmost dispatch so as to enable peace-on-earth sooner rather than later ... so much so that when the going got rocky, from time to time, when ‘I’ put ‘my’ foot on the brake pedal in order to slow the process down the pedal went straight to the floor.

‘I’ was on the ride of a life-time.

Gary: The excellence experience, if not labelled such, might seem to be an experience of exceptional clarity and lucidity. With the PCE, words like bounteousness, bursting, pouring forth, vibrant, clear, alive, animate, come to mind.

Richard: The words ‘exceptional clarity and lucidity’ strikes me as being a very good description of the distinction when compared with ‘bounteousness, bursting, pouring forth’ and so on as I am swimming in largesse.

Gary: One of the things that was most striking about it was how uncommon everything appeared, how rich and variegated everything was.

Richard: Yes, I took particular note of your depiction of the stone in the gravel pit: sometimes peoples have looked at me in shock when I wax eloquent about actual intimacy with a stone, a brick, a glass ashtray, a polystyrene cup and so on, but I just tell them that I am officially mad and/or that I am a war veteran and they, presumably, go away content that all has been thus satisfactorily explained.

It is great that you are here for your input from all your posts is invaluable. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Gary, 15 August 2000).

Or this description from a correspondent, who had explicit PCEs, describing here what was happening for him at the time –

Respondent: I’ll try to give an accurate description of this, but it’s very difficult to convey the quality of it. If you have experienced this, you will probably recognise it at once; if not, I don’t think there is any way of conveying it.

There is an increase in sensory clarity, especially visual acuity. Along with this increase in clarity there is a ‘purity’ in everything one perceives. The words ‘immaculate’, ‘perfect’, ‘pure’ capture it quite well; everything is wonderful. Strangely, though, the word ‘beautiful’ does not apply. There is no (felt) affect whatsoever. The purity of perception (and the marvellousness of what is perceived) goes beyond affect, leaving only pure, calm wonder. It’s sensory delight without any emotional resonance at all. The sensory delight I’m talking about is not the usual kind of sensuousness/ sensuality that one enjoys in an ordinary state. Rather than being ‘pleasurable’, it is appreciation of the perfection that seems to be inherent in what one is perceiving, which leads to enjoyment of a very different kind.

This is quite extraordinary. There is a sensation of softness in the air, which has a pellucid, jelly-like quality (metaphorically speaking). I’m reminded of something you once wrote about the eyes ‘lightly caressing’, as if one is seeing from the front of the eyeball. I also remember you saying ‘nothing dirty can get in’, and that’s exactly the way it is. Objects that would seem drab, dirty, sullied, soiled in ‘reality’ are immaculate in themselves; any ‘dirtiness’ is overlaid by ‘me’. (This is not an intellectual realisation but a direct perception of the fact).

In many ways this is like a PCE. The mode of perception is strikingly similar to a PCE. But when I turn my attention to the writer of this message, something is different but I can’t put my finger on it. I’m not really sure whether ‘I’ am here at all, or whether ‘I’ am only a thought/ feeling that briefly intercedes between perceptions and assumes itself to be the agent of this body’s actions. This sounds awkward in words, but there is nothing at all awkward or confusing about what I’m experiencing.

I am not sure that I would call this a ‘self’-less experience because, although there is no affect (none that I recognise, none whatsoever), there is still a sense of agency that could be given the name ‘me’ for convenience. (Am I making any sense? Do you know what I’m talking about?).

Richard: Yes ... you may find the following link useful in this regard: (Library, Topics, Excellence). [Emphasis added]. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 60c, 22 May 2004).

Maybe you described something similar here –

Kuba: Right now I experience myself to be here where this moment is happening but there is certainly affect still happening, but it’s like there is only pure affect and then there is actuality all around. (10 Jul 2025)

KUBA: This does appear to be so, that moment when apperceptiveness is taking place it is not ‘me’ tasting the actual, there is the experience of actuality itself, when ‘I’ shortly return ‘I’ have a recent memory that the actual world exists. In the near-PCE state of naiveté this happens at a frequent rate, the actual world seems to be not far at all and yet for ‘me’ it is actually inaccessible, as it always is.

VINEETO: Of course, the actual world is not far away, it is right under your nose.

It also could be that it is not quite apperceptiveness, or apperception, taking place but something similar in quality but missing the magical out-of-this-world element of the PCE. I am not suggesting you never experienced PCEs but perhaps not paying meticulous attention to the difference in quality between a PCE and experiences that were akin to a PCE but not quite. This lack of scrupulousness may have made it easier for ‘me’ to step in and claim them all as ‘my’ experiences, even as something ‘I’ created not something that ‘I’ have to step out of the way in order to experience it.

Richard: Apperception, as I said, is the mind’s perception of itself – it is a bare awareness. Normally the mind perceives through the senses and sorts the data received according to its predilection; but the mind itself remains unperceived ... it is taken to be unknowable. Apperception happens when the ‘who’ inside abdicates its throne and a pure awareness occurs. The PCE is as if one has eyes in the back of one’s head; there is a three hundred and sixty degree awareness and all is self-evidently clear. This is knowing by direct experience, unmediated by any ‘who’ whatsoever. One is able to see that the ‘who’ of one has been standing in the way of the perfection and purity that is the essential nature of this moment of being here becoming apparent. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List A, No. 15, No. 07).

*

Richard: Apperception is the clear and direct experiencing of being just here at this place in infinite space right now at this moment in eternal time – sans identity and its feeling-fed realities – and it is a wordless appreciation of being alive and awake on this verdant and azure planet. Apperception is where one is living in the already always existing peace-on-earth and is where one is blithe and carefree, even if one is doing nothing: doing something – and that includes thinking – is a bonus on top of the never-ending perfection of the infinitude which this material universe is. Apperception is where one is the universe being stunningly aware of its own infinitude. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 19a, 1 September 2001).

Only you can figure this out.

As you said less than two weeks ago …

Kuba: As such I have never put everything on a “it doesn’t ultimately matter” basis, one of the key things Richard did when first stepping onto the wide and wondrous path.

So yes this does already explain the different results for ‘Kuba’ and ‘Richard’.

… perhaps this is something you might contemplate doing?

Richard: I did everything possible that ‘I’ could do to blatantly imitate the actual in that ‘I’ endeavoured to be happy and harmless for as much as is humanly possible. This was achieved by putting everything on a ‘it doesn’t really matter’ basis. That is, ‘I’ would prefer people, things and events to be a particular way, but if it did not turn out like that ... it did not really matter for it was only a preference. ‘I’ chose to no longer give other people – or the weather – the power to make ‘me’ angry ... or even irritated ... or even peeved. (Richard, List B, No. 12a, 16 July 1998).

KUBA: However via ‘being’ naiveté ‘I’ am inviting apperceptiveness to happen over and over, and each time ‘I’ am bleeping out for the duration of the apperceptive seeing, even if it is just a flash, and another flash etc.

This last paragraph explains quite well how it plays out experientially for me.

VINEETO: Remember, you have some experience now with trying to do ‘shortcuts’ which revealed to be rather diversions, avoidance and delays –

Respondent: I have (big) issues to sort out first before I will be able to make the leap.

Richard: As there is no ‘leap’ – an actual freedom is not a spiritual freedom – it would indeed appear so.

Respondent: I guess there are no shortcuts.

Richard: What I find telling – and this is a general observation – is just how much peoples object to being happy and harmless ... the vast majority of the correspondence in the archives is, in fact, a cutting indictment on the human condition itself.

Do you realise – and this is a personal observation – you have just said, in effect, that you guess you will have to become a happy ‘being’ before you can become actually free from the human condition (as if were there a way to be thus free without having to do so you would not)?

Whereas it is actually such a delight to finally be able to be happy (and harmless) ... and a relief. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 54, 27 November 2003).

Richard described the range of naïveness this way –

Richard: A rather quaint clay-pit tale which nonetheless depicts the range of naïveness from being sincere to becoming naïve and all the way through being naïveté itself⁽⁰¹⁾ to an actual innocence. (Richard, A Quaint Clay-Pit Tale, last tooltip).

Why do you want “‘being’ naiveté” before comfortably and reliably “being sincere to becoming naïve”?

Cheers Vineeto

November 3 2025

KUBA: So this morning I had an interesting experience, I will write it down here so that I don’t do with it what I usually do. I was having a cigarette in the garden and slowly waking up. There was the experience that I was here, solidly in the garden and no place else. This was contrasted with where ‘I’ usually am, which is in the cinema room of ‘my’ projections. It was this contrast that stood out, that ‘I’ am never ever here, ‘I’ am watching the movie of ‘my’ life somewhere inside the psyche. ‘I’ am watching those various images flash on the screen, this is ‘my’ life. And now those images where as if wiped off and there was the awareness of being here. This was fascinating in itself, that this is what ‘my’ life amounts to in the end, images flashing on the screen of ‘my’ psyche, no wonder ‘I’ suffer, ‘I’ can never ever be here where all is genuine. The flesh and blood body called Kuba has nothing to do with that ‘cinema room’, he is here where this moment is happening.

So now that the experience is over, ‘I’ am back to ‘my cinema room’ and yet ‘I’ remember that there is a genuine world where this flesh and blood body exists and that it would be relief unimaginable for this flesh and blood body to live where all is genuine and for ‘me’ to no longer live ‘my’ life.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

What an excellent insight. Here you say it very clearly “‘I’ can never ever be here where all is genuine”, and what’s more, that “it would be relief unimaginable for this flesh and blood body” called Kuba “to live where all is genuine”.

In that moment you had no objections for ‘me’ to disappear.

KUBA: So in terms of what use this experience has… ‘I’ cannot make it ‘mine’ as ‘I’ was seen to be living essentially a parallel life ‘some place else’. Perhaps there is the intent, seeing that “unimaginable relief” aspect, that ‘my’ self-immolation releases this body from ‘my’ bondage and ‘me’ from ‘my’ burden.

Actually there is something else here, about the imitation aspect. Because in the experience both ‘me’ and ‘my’ resistance are of no concern, because it is a different world altogether. Whereas when ‘I’ am back behind the throne all of a sudden ‘my’ resistance has ‘weight’ to it again. So it seems this is where I trip up with the in the meantime aspect, is it simply a question of putting some effort in?

VINEETO: Where the objection lies, is what to do in the meantime because the actualism method imitating actuality means to genuinely diminish ‘me’, on a continuous basis, and with knowledge aforethought, with a ‘self’-less inclination to be increasingly happy and harmless. Richard says it exquisitely in his journal –

Richard: With apperception operating more or less continuously in ‘my’ day-to day life, ‘I’ find it harder and harder to maintain credibility. ‘I’ am increasingly seen as the usurper, an alien entity inhabiting this body and taking on an identity of its own. Mercilessly exposed in the bright light of awareness – apperception casts no shadows – ‘I’ can no longer find ‘my’ position tenable. ‘I’ can only live in obscuration, where ‘I’ lurk about, creating all sorts of mischief. ‘My’ time is speedily coming to an end, ‘I’ can barely maintain ‘myself’ any longer. (Richard’s Journal, Article Eighteen, page 135)

But apparently the alien entity inhabiting Kuba’s body got the upper hand yet again.

KUBA: Hmm there is a 3rd option which I have not considered before, and this might be it. That the experience itself is a mirage, because it was not a PCE, there was not that magical aspect there. Could the thing itself be a diversion then. Perhaps the sensible way to proceed is that if pure intent is not squarely experienced then the experience itself should have a big question mark over it.

This seems to be the case, because there was that morning resentment, a heaviness of the day ahead, and so ‘I’ must have created a mirage to escape the feeling. Well at least it’s good I am beginning to catch onto this. It’s a little like what Richard discussed with the lady in the PCE DVD, that there was pain and ‘she’ went into an ASC in order to escape the pain.
So those experiences preceded by good/ bad feelings these can be contaminated. That is for sure a very important reason to apply the method in the meantime! Any potential glimpse of actuality should come from felicity and innocuity rather than desperation / aggrandisement.

VINEETO: Well, well, well, because putting in effort (i.e. action) to gradually diminish ‘me’ – the very thought of it is anathema to ‘me’ – you now question this excellent experience itself as a mirage (since it’s impossible to make it ‘your’ own the way you put it already into words), and state that it “should have a big question mark over it”. Then ‘you’ don’t have to do anything ‘in the meantime’.

By the way, if you watch the video again you’ll see that Pamela in the PCE-video talked about a past experience yet whilst talking with Richard had the guts to now allow a PCE to happen and revel in the magnificence and ease of it.

What a cunning manoeuvre – is that why you never went past first base? Now that the eye-opening experience itself (described at the beginning of your post) has been discredited as a mirage ‘you’ can justify remaining as ‘you’ are.

Really?

Is that how you want to while away your life? Steeple-chasing and then armchair-philosophising?

I wonder when you are going to catch on to ‘your’ dirty tricks and actively fulfil your secret yearning to be genuine, innocent?

Cheers Vineeto

November 4 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

It is not a lack of willingness to put effort in, that I know, because I am willing to put endless effort into the “steeple-chasing and then armchair-philosophising”, so then it is a lack of willingness for action itself. Right now I am putting in a lot of effort and yet not taking action.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Effort, as in sudorific, is what you know to do well, but that is not required, on the contrary, effort is ‘self’-enhancing and no fun.

Richard I might add, though, that naïveté does away with all that ‘heavy lifting’ you spoke of in an earlier e-mail. Viz.:

• [Respondent]: ‘From what I can glean so far, virtual freedom is a period of ‘heavy lifting’. (‘Introduction’; Friday, 27 July 2003).

Where you have gleaned this diaphoretic impression from has got me stumped ... here is but one of the many ways I describe the actualism practice:

• [Richard]: ‘... 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. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 38, 20 February 2003).

Or even more specifically to the point of your ‘heavy lifting’ comment:

• [Co-Respondent]: ‘If it is the experiencer that makes efforts to be aware and stay aware, the centre is strengthened, not dissolved, right?
• [Richard]: ‘Since when has naiveté been sudorific? (Richard, List B, No 12q, 5 January 2003).

In short: if it be not either easy (effortless) or fun (enjoyable) then there is something to look at until it is again. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 46, 9 August 2003).

I suggest before you ‘spring into action’ and habitually “put endless effort” into it, as per your habitual modus operandi, let the head-spinning occur until a clear understanding emerges from the core of your being regarding which direction you want to take and why. Out of that might arise an action which is not effort but fun. Ask Sonya –

Sonya: And yes I am noticing that I am having much more fun with digging around what’s going on. Whereas in the past it was almost like “nope I don’t want to look at it!” and trying to will it away.

KUBA: Action is what brings ‘me’ towards that which is glimpsed in those experiences – “it would be relief unimaginable for this flesh and blood body to live where all is genuine and for ‘me’ to no longer live ‘my’ life”. It’s the bridge between ‘me’ as ‘I’ am now and the possibility of ‘my’ extinction.

VINEETO: For now ‘action’ is simply a word for you, without substance or lasting commitment. If action was the result of, for instance, your excellent experience from yesterday – the clear insight, this potentially life-changing insight, that “‘I’ was standing in the way of the actual being apparent” there would be no hesitation. If you allowed this insight to stand, without diminishing it or discrediting it or negating it and let it gestate, then a clear course of actualisation (see Sundry, FAQ, Realisation/ Actualisation) would follow (perhaps putting everything on a ‘it doesn’t really matter basis’). If it be a forced, merely a cognitive decision, only ‘effort’ against ‘your’ will to remain as ‘you’ are would follow.

KUBA: So the trick is that ‘I’ can prevent ‘my’ eventual extinction by never taking action, the action being what you described below :

Vineeto: Where the objection lies, is what to do in the meantime because the actualism method imitating actuality means to genuinely diminish ‘me’, on a continuous basis, and with knowledge aforethought, with a ‘self’-less inclination to be increasingly happy and harmless. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Kuba11, 3 November 2025).

VINEETO: Yes. Ha, not only preventing your “eventual extinction” but preventing any loss of ‘your’ territory whatsoever. Such is the cunning of the lost, lonely and frightened entity inside of you.

KUBA: If ‘I’ am genuinely diminished on a continuous basis whilst at the same time knowing full well what lies at the end then it becomes a slide towards ‘my’ demise, the action in question would assure it happens.

VINEETO: It can only be a voluntary decision born of the insight you had of the utter magnificence and unquestionable purity of the actual world, that is already always right here, right now.

Richard: G’day No. 13, Just putting in a plug for what is propagated by the website.

The ultimate source of an actualist’s pure intent is, of course, the pristine purity of the innocence which prevails in the pure consciousness experience (PCE).

For those who are unable to recall/ unable to trigger a PCE there is the near-purity of the sincerity which inheres in naiveté – the nearest a ‘self’ can get to innocence whilst remaining a ‘self’ – which naiveté is an aspect of oneself locked away in childhood through ridicule, derision, and so on, that one has dared not to resurrect for fear of appearing foolish, a simpleton, in both others’ eyes and, thus, one’s own.

(Because ‘naïve’ and ‘gullible’ are so closely linked – via the trusting nature of a child in concert with the lack of knowledge inherent to childhood – in the now-adult mind, most peoples initially have difficulty separating the one from another).

Now, as ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’, then seeing the fact that it is plainly and simply ‘my’ choice as to how ‘I’ experience this moment – the only moment one is actually alive – is a first step leading to its discovery.

And, as the part-sentence you have quoted (further above) has been extracted out from the middle of the first paragraph of the section entitled ‘The Who And How of Attentiveness And Sensuousness And Apperceptiveness’, in the ‘Attentiveness And Sensuousness And Apperceptiveness’ article, then the opening lines provide a clue to an answer for your queries. Viz.:

• [quote] ‘The intent is you will become happy and harmless.
The intent is you will be free of sorrow and malice. The intent is you will become blithesome and benign. The intent is you will be free of fear and aggression. The intent is you will become carefree and considerate. The intent is you will be free from nurture and desire. The intent is you will become gay and benevolent. The intent is you will be free of anguish and animosity. The intent is that, by being free of the Human Condition, you will experience peace-on-earth, in this life-time, as this body ... as is evidenced in a pure consciousness experience (PCE) (...)’. [endquote]

Spelled-out sequentially that first part of the paragraph, immediately prior to the part-sentence you extracted, can look something like this:

1. The initial intent comes from a vital interest in becoming happy and harmless.

That intent thus creates a vested interest in being free of sorrow and malice.

2. The initial intent comes from a vital interest in becoming blithesome and benign.

That intent thus creates a vested interest in being free of fear and aggression.

3. The initial intent comes from a vital interest in becoming carefree and considerate.

That intent thus creates a vested interest in being free from nurture and desire.

4. The initial intent comes from a vital interest in becoming gay and benevolent.

That intent thus creates a vested interest in being free of anguish and animosity.

*

All of this vital interest/ vested interest enables sincerity – as to be in accord with the fact/being aligned with factuality/ staying true to facticity is what being sincere is (as in being authentic/ guileless, genuine/ artless, straightforward/ ingenuous) and to be sincere is to be the key which unlocks naiveté ... then the summing-up sentence can now look something like this:

The [sincere/ naïve] intent, then, is that by being free of the human condition you will experience peace-on-earth, in this life-time, as this body ... as is evidenced in the PCE.

As that summary sentence leads straight on to the sentence you have part-quoted from then it too can now look something like this:

• [quote]: ‘(...) An actualist’s intent is a [sincere/ naïve] intent and discovering how to blend this [sincere/ naïve] intent via attentiveness – into one’s conscious life is the process that places one on the wide and wondrous path to actual freedom ... this path is a virtual freedom’. [end quote]

Which in turn is immediately followed by the how-to sentences:

• [quote] ‘Uncovering how to prolong the condition of virtual freedom – via attentiveness and sensuousness – is still another process. These are felicitous and innocuous processes, however, and they are well worth the effort for attentiveness and sensuousness are central to virtual freedom and the key to the whole condition. Attentiveness and sensuousness are both the goal of actualism and the means to that end: one reaches apperceptiveness by being ever more sensuous and one activates sensuousness by being ever more attentive ... and one activates attentiveness by no longer ‘feeling good’. [endquote]

In other words, it is the experiencing of no longer ‘feeling good’ (or ‘feeling happy/ harmless’ or ‘feeling excellent/ perfect’) which activates attentiveness again (as in it ‘jogs the memory’ to pay attention).

It is all a very, very simple method, actually. (Richard, List D, No. 13, 21 May 2009).

Cheers Vineeto

November 6 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

I see the trick now, and it’s not just this one particular trick but ‘my’ tricks altogether, which are there essentially as breaks to prevent motion, as motion means that ‘my’ territory is at stake.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

To forget any experiential evidence of actuality altogether from a PCE is quite common given the ubiquity of the human condition. What I understand your particular trick was to either absorb any experience of the actual world as ‘your’ territory or deny its relevance as a call to action, i.e. intent. Hence my question if it was perhaps a spiritual approach of chasing realisations, believing they would give ‘you’ value, virtue, credit, a “favourable place in a group” (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Kuba 11, 23 Oct 2025) as tangible real-world achievement.

KUBA: It’s funny because I always thought I wanted an adventure, but this is a genuine adventure now and I wonder if I have the minerals for it.

VINEETO: I appreciate your honesty – fear is not an easy thing to admit to oneself, let alone in public. The word which feeling being ‘Vineeto’ had for such courage to be a pioneer in something entirely new to human consciousness was ‘mettle’.

Also, when I answered Sonya’s message I found your reference to Srinath’s ‘sandpit actualism’ where you said –

Kuba: I remember there was a time on this forum when the words pure intent were replaced with purity. That instead of establishing a connection to pure intent one would connect with purity. I went along with this which I now see as a bastardised version of what pure intent actually is. What I confirmed yesterday is that indeed connecting with “purity” is missing the very key aspect of the “genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity”. I was blown away when I experienced it last night, it was sweet, it was irresistibly enticing, it was impossible not to care, it was something that could easily pull ‘me’ all the way to ‘my’ demise without a shred of resistance.

Whereas this whole “connecting to purity” I see more as something along the lines of allowing sensuousness. Because when sensuousness is happening there is very much this aspect of the world being like this perfect and pure jewel, and yet that is not pure intent – “a genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe”.

Before the qualitative shift took place last year it would be more correct to say that I was allowing purity over and over, I was not allowing pure intent over and over, I was not allowing the “genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe” to be dynamically operative – certainly what I experienced last night, I was not allowing that over and over. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Kuba 11, 7 June 2025a)

Just make sure that what you experienced as the “mirificent flavour” is indeed pure intent, the “genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity” and not the previous “connecting to purity”. Is it something which is “irresistibly enticing, it was impossible not to care, it was something that could easily pull ‘me’ all the way to ‘my’ demise without a shred of resistance”?

It is this, the genuine experience of pure intent, which provides the mettle to proceed.

Richard had several conversations with Alan on the topic of fear and courage, here are the last paragraphs of one of them –

Alan: So, of course, it was ‘natural’ for people to say they had a ‘vision of god’, or some such – and back we are to ‘terms of reference’. The point I am making is that when someone had a PCE, even if it did not degenerate into an ASC, both their report, and that of others, would be of a religious, or spiritual experience. However, that does not, at least wholly, explain the fact that you appear to be the only living example of what you call ‘actual freedom’.

Richard: Once again: Why Richard? One reason lies in my personal history where, being in a war, my life became a living nightmare ... literally. I was trapped in an horrific world of dread and foreboding and in order to escape from the savage barbarity of the situation my mind somehow created a new ‘reality’ built out of the extremities of fear, which hallucination I would call ‘unreality’. Thus I escaped into a place where all is calm and peaceful that was not unlike being in the centre of a cyclone – all about rages fear and hatred, anger and aggression – but in there all was apparently calm and peaceful.

Thus I knew from experience that it is possible to create an ‘unreality’ in order to escape the grim and glum real-world reality. 26 years later I came to realise that the ‘Greater Reality’ was nothing but an escape – the mystical realm is a culturally revered hallucination – and that completion was already here ... and had always been. (There are three world’s altogether ... the natural reality that 6.0 billion people live in and the super-natural Reality that .000001 of the population live in ... and this actual world. I call it actual because it is the world of this body and its sense organs only ... and nary a god or goddess to be found. This is because I left my ‘self’ behind in the ‘real world’ ... where it belongs). I would not – and could not – live a lie. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Alan, 12 January 1999)

KUBA: It’s not that the motion is painful or anything like that, it’s a wonderful adventure but it’s actually happening … I don’t have a word for it because it’s not scary and yet it’s as if the hairs on my neck are standing up.

VINEETO: Thrill perhaps? Or this other word? –

Richard: Incidentally, here is perhaps the ‘fear of/ aversion to’ which would be most applicable to a would-be actualist:

• metathesiophobia: fear of changes. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 79, 10 February 2005)

KUBA: It seems that each time ‘I’ dare to give up some of ‘my’ territory there is the initial resistance etc and then once it goes there is a greater scope of enjoyment and appreciation available and then again ‘I’ put up a barrier a little lower down and play the same game over again. The tricks seem to come in to play in particular when there is that potential of the next bit of ‘my’ territory being given up.

VINEETO: Again, once you establish the experiential connection to pure intent, the “genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity” which blew you away, the initial resistance will melt away.

Richard: The key to success lies in realising that fear does not go anywhere (meaning that nothing ever happens except more fear). (Richard, List Actual Freedom, No. 79, 21 June 2005)

*

Kuba: It’s funny because I always thought I wanted an adventure, but this is a genuine adventure now and I wonder if I have the minerals for it.

KUBA: Ha of course I do! It’s already happening, the dare was to allow enjoyment and appreciation into those outlines of ‘me’ which ‘I’ have been protecting, instinctually so. Those outlines are now permeated, with enjoyment and appreciation bubbling through.

Richard: In short: if it be not either easy (effortless) or fun (enjoyable) then there is something to look at until it is again. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 46, 9 August 2003).

VINEETO: Ah, this is what was missing and what might well be responsible for your previously reoccurring “evening gloom” and “morning resentment”. You explained them theoretically to yourself but that did nothing to disperse them.

KUBA: The “something to look at” is that thing / anything which is preventing my enjoyment and appreciation of this (my only) moment of being alive. Funnily enough it is ‘my’ actualist identity that often gets serious and therefore prevents the very enjoyment and appreciation it is apparently meant to facilitate – cunning indeed!

VINEETO: Yes, the identity is always very serious – ‘you’ feel that ‘my survival is at stake’. Hence my repeated suggestion to put everything on a preference basis to shift the balance.

Richard: ... the human species has been doing its thing for at least 50,000 years or so – no essential difference has been discerned between the Cro-Magnon human and Modern-Day human – and may very well continue to do its thing for, say, another 50,000 years or so ... it matters not, in what has been described as ‘the vast scheme of things’ or ‘the big picture’, and so on, whether none, one or many peoples become actually free from the human condition (this planet, indeed the entire solar system, is going to cease to exist in its current form about 4.5 billion years from now). All these words – yours, mine, and others (all the dictionaries, encyclopaedias, scholarly tomes and so on) – will perish and all the monuments, all the statues, all the tombstones, all the sacred sites, all the carefully conserved/ carefully restored memorabilia, will vanish as if they had never existed ... nothing will remain of any human endeavour (including yours truly). Nothing at all ... nil, zero, zilch. Which means that nothing really matters in the long run and, as nothing really does matter (in this ultimate sense) it is simply not possible to take life seriously ... sincerely, yes, but seriously? No way ... life is much too much fun to be serious! (Richard, List Actual Freedom, No. 25h, 24 December 2004).

KUBA: So Vineeto, I can see perhaps where sincerity can be located, you know it has been quite intense talking with you, my guess is you have had a great time behind the keyboard but for ‘me’ it has been rather serious. But on the other hand, ‘I’ could have had the sense of humour and the sincerity to enjoy finding the various tricks that ‘I’ might be playing. But both the sense of humour and the sincerity would require that ‘I’ see and accept that ‘I’ am as mad and as bad as everyone else and hence there is no sense in shame and embarrassment. Without this crucial acknowledgment there is no possibility for naiveté to eventually flourish, sincerity is required first. I am perhaps seeing like a seed of genuine sincerity now, which comes from the acknowledgement that the human condition is common to all.

VINEETO: I am well aware that “it has been quite intense talking with you” and I sometimes wondered if I said more than you were willing to hear. But when you said that “I am now in a similar if not the same place to where I was when you began writing on the forum”, which was July last year, I intended to discover, with you, how you can find the reason and counter the tendency of moving in ineffective circles. When you replied to each of my messages I took it that you were equally interested despite the intensity.

Now that you (according to your next post) have sincerely acknowledged that you are “as mad and as bad as everyone else” – does this make it somewhat easier and more fun?

*

KUBA: The above has washed over ‘me’ thoroughly and big time, ‘I’ can’t quite put into words the extent of the change in perspective although I understand a little more now what is meant by the words fellowship regard. Actually Sonya’s recent post was quite well timed, when I saw it I thought “let’s see what stands of that sincerity now”, because it is the case that whatever impression she gleaned from me would have been misleading, however it was the best I knew to do at the time, just like it is so for all the other fellow human beings trapped within the human condition.

VINEETO: Sonya’s post is indeed significant as she explains how one proceeds with sincerity and naiveté, and any fear to give up ‘my’ territory hardly plays a part. What is even more important is the fact that’s it’s easy and increases confidence and fun to proceed –

Sonya: It is amazing how simply noticing, coupled with the intent to be happy and harmless can lead to such change. I can say now I’ve reaped quite a few benefits from this.

Something Richard wrote in his journal might be worth remembering –

Richard: It is, of course, a bold step to forsake lofty thoughts, profound feelings and psychic adumbrations and enter the actuality of life as a sensate experience. [Emphasis added]. (Richard’s Journal, Foreword, p. 15)

KUBA: And in the absence of shame and embarrassment I experience such a deep appreciation for what human beings are and for the fact that there is now a way to eradicate the human condition, and also for what has been done towards that end so far. And it is the absence of shame and embarrassment which allows for the human condition itself to be squarely addressed.
This is definitely one to put a huge circle around and do everything for this seed of sincerity to flourish, and indeed this is my intent.

VINEETO: Yes, and not as a concept or theoretical thought but as action, taking one small step to sincerely start paying attention how you can be more happy and more harmless. It has the beneficial side-effect that you become more confident in the doing of it – success breeds success.

Richard: You need to have a keen sense of humour. This business of becoming free is not – contrary to popular opinion – a serious business at all. Be totally sincere ... most definitely utterly sincere, as genuineness is essential. But serious ... no way. An actual freedom is all about having fun; about enjoying being here now; about delighting in being alive. All that “being serious” stuff actively works against peace-on-earth. One has to want to be here on this planet ... (Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive)

Pat yourself on the back for all the uncovering and discovering you have done which clears the way forward. The human condition is weird and sometimes it’s weird to get out of it.

Cheers Vineeto

November 7 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

Thank you for your extensive reply.

VINEETO: Just make sure that what you experienced as the “mirificent flavour” is indeed pure intent, the “genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity” and not the previous “connecting to purity”. Is it something which is “irresistibly enticing, it was impossible not to care, it was something that could easily pull ‘me’ all the way to ‘my’ demise without a shred of resistance”?
It is this, the genuine experience of pure intent, which provides the mettle to proceed.

KUBA: Yes that I am sure of, the “mirificent flavour” is far more than just sensate purity, there is actual meaning woven into it, something ultimately precious. And yes, it has the capacity to pull ‘me’ all the way through to ‘my’ end, the goal is so precious that the means are taken care of. Actually yesterday when that seeing – of what sincerity is and what fellowship regard is – was washing over ‘me’ the flavour was there again, it results in a seemingly bottomless appreciation and it can only lead to action.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

You are very welcome.

Now that you experienced “what sincerity is and what fellowship regard is”, will you be able to rememorate and representiate the experience without turning it into a pliable concept? You see, I know from ‘Vineeto’s’ experience how cunning ‘I’ am.

KUBA: I think where I have gone wrong (quite severely) in the past is where it concerned blending the above into ‘my’ moment to moment experiencing. What I can see now is that there is actually no way for ‘me’ to enjoy and appreciate this moment of being alive if ‘I’ am not at the very least sincere. Because if ‘I’ am not sincere it means there is something to hide and there are parts of ‘me’ in opposition.

VINEETO: I would go further, saying that even when you are sincere “there is something to hide and there are parts of ‘me’ in opposition” but the good news is that when you are sincere (“being aligned with factuality/ staying true to facticity”) on an ongoing basis you will eventually recognize and acknowledge those still-hidden parts and those which are “in opposition” whenever they surface without pushing them away or justifying their maintenance.

KUBA: This action of hiding and splitting it prevents a clean enjoyment and appreciation. Whatever ‘enjoyment and appreciation’ which is conjured up when not sincere is bound to have good/ bad feelings mixed in, it is not clean and so it will not lead to that “mirificent flavour”. Whereas when being sincere it is as if a straight line to that flavour.

VINEETO: Being sincere simply means being ruthlessly honest, not lying to yourself and sticking to the facts –

Richard: Sincerity is to be in accord with the fact/ being aligned with factuality/ staying true to facticity (as in being authentic/ guileless, genuine/ artless, straightforward/ ingenuous). (Richard, Abditorium, Innocence, #Sincere).

It does not mean it automatically “is as if a straight line to that flavour”.

KUBA: So for now it seems like I have a fun adventure ahead which is to apply the actualism method sincerely (not that doing it insincerely makes any sense lol). Which means that when ‘I’ am not enjoying and appreciating there is something to look at to find out why, and doing so sincerely does away with the hard work and all that other stuff.

VINEETO: Mmh, you might imbue too much into the word “sincerely” – finding out some of the obstacles to being happy and harmless sometimes involves investigating something which you so far have avoided looking at. Finding out all of the obstacles to becoming actually free does sometimes require “nerves of steel”.

*

VINEETO: Thrill perhaps? Or this other word? –

Richard: Incidentally, here is perhaps the ‘fear of/ aversion to’ which would be most applicable to a would-be actualist:

• metathesiophobia: fear of changes. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 79, 10 February 2005)

KUBA: Haha yes that is spot on! Interestingly enough this does not play any part right now, it seems the fear of change applies only when ‘I’ am standing still, paralysed. But actually there is a different route to take anyways, as you said a while ago “when in a hole, stop digging”. It only takes that ‘I’ find ‘my’ way back to that clean enjoyment and appreciation and once there ‘I’ have the support from the universe, and there is motion.

VINEETO: Why not do it for a few days and then report what you discovered in order to be more “aligned with factuality/ staying true to facticity”.

KUBA: I wonder why the resistance to sincerity in the first place, it seems fundamentally that ‘I’ don’t want to be seen. ‘I’ go into some extraordinary efforts to hide, to split, to deceive etc. And actually the way of ‘me’ hiding is the painful and difficult way, the way of ‘my’ exposure is the way to ‘my’ dissolution and that is actually the easy way. It’s a bit like when I was younger and I would lie a lot, and eventually there was all these alternate storylines that I was having to memorise to keep up the facade, and then one day it clicked that to end the lies was actually what would end the burden.

VINEETO: There are several reasons – at core that ‘I’ don’t want to be seen because ‘I’ can only exist in obscurity. But this overall summary does not miraculously wipe away all the various reason why ‘I’ want to hide this or that aspect of my identity, my self-image, my persona(s), my ambition, my pride, etc. Often people lie whilst being most sincere because they believe what they say to be the truth.

So neither exposure nor “dissolution” is necessarily “actually the easy way”, otherwise you would have done it a long time ago.

KUBA: And also isn’t the social identity (including an ‘actualist identity’) exactly that? A facade which hides what ‘I’ am at core? It makes sense why ‘my’ self-immolation is ‘my’ moment of glory, after living a life of lies ‘I’ finally get to set the record straight.

I never saw that, that when ‘I’ die ‘I’ die as a fraud, in fact that is why ‘I’ allow ‘my’ demise, because a fraud is all that ‘I’ can ever be, that is why ‘I’ sacrifice ‘my’ life for the benefit of this body, that body and everybody.

VINEETO: The social identity it not merely “a façade” hiding ‘me’ at the core – there would be even more murder and mayhem and all the rest if it wasn’t for the controls created by the social identity.

Richard: A social identity is a psychological creation manufactured by society to act as a guardian over the wayward rudimentary self one was born with. All sentient beings are born with a biologically coded instinctive drive for physical survival which, when one is operating and functioning with a group of people, is potentially a danger to the survival of other group members. Hence the need for principles and morals and ethics to regulate the conduct of each person ... with appropriate rewards and punishments to ensure compliance.

In a well-meant but ultimately short-sighted effort to prevent gaols from being filled to over-flowing, a social identity – a psychological guardian – is fabricated in an earnest endeavour to prevent the offences from happening in the first place. This ‘guardian’ is programmed with a set of values and charged with the role of acting as a conscience over the wayward self. A conscience is made up of a sure knowledge of what is Right or Wrong and Good or Bad ... as determined by each society. By and large this enterprise has proved to be effective – only a small minority of citizens fail to behave in a socially acceptable manner. (Library, Topics, Social Identity)

• [Richard]: “(...) the social identity cannot safely be whittled away unless there be the pure intent to be happy and harmless, each moment again, born of the PCE, because this socialised conscience, the moral/ ethical and principled entity with its inculcated societal knowledge of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ (cultural values), has been implanted for a very good reason.

It is there to control the wayward self which lurks within the human breast ... which is why dedication to peace-on-earth is paramount.”(Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 25b, 24 June 2003).

KUBA: 

Geoffrey: There was the actual world just right there in front of me, obviously existing, pure and perfect, and then there was ‘me’, ‘humanity’. The contrast was simply hilarious. I can’t describe how hilarious this contrast was. What we’ve all been doing forever and ever, on a ridiculous parade of malice and sorrow, with the greatest seriousness.

I realised that I would indeed gladly die right now, gladly give away all I am, all I ever was, all I’ve done and felt since I was born, for peace-on-earth to be apparent (not even for me but) for everybody. For things to be as they are. And that it would be of no importance at all. No ‘weight’, no drama… just the only thing that made sense, the only sensible thing. (Geoffrey, Report of Becoming Free)

The ‘Geoffrey’ that allowed ‘his’ demise saw that both ‘he’ and ‘humanity’ were a fraud – “a ridiculous parade of malice and sorrow”.

VINEETO: Geoffrey describes ‘me’ and ‘humanity’ from the perspective of the actual world, from a fully flourishing pure intent.

You, being firmly within the human condition, now used his words to make a farce of the altruism that facilitates ‘self’-immolation where ‘I’ give up what ‘I’ hold most dear for the benefit of this body, that body and everybody.

Richard: Thus when ‘I’ willingly self-immolate – psychologically and psychically – then ‘I’ am making the most noble sacrifice that ‘I’ can make for oneself and all humankind ... for ‘I’ am what ‘I’ hold most dear. It is ‘my’ moment of glory. It is ‘my’ crowning achievement ... it makes ‘my’ petty life all worth while. It is not an event to be missed ... to physically die without having experienced what it is like to become dead is such a waste of a life. (Richard, List B, No. 13, 26 May 1999)

Can you see how in the process of writing this message you started with the memory of a genuine experience, and noticing where you have gone wrong in the past, … to then provide a concept out of what it is to be sincere, creating a map for the future, fooling yourself how easy it all will be, philosophising about the social identity being a mere façade and finally end up watering down the altruism required for your manumission as being a mere act of garbage (fraud) disposal?

Can you lift your game please?

Cheers Vineeto

November 8 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

VINEETO: I would go further, saying that even when you are sincere “there is something to hide and there are parts of ‘me’ in opposition” but the good news is that when you are sincere (“being aligned with factuality/ staying true to facticity”) on an ongoing basis you will eventually recognize and acknowledge those still-hidden parts and those which are “in opposition” whenever they surface without pushing them away or justifying their maintenance.

KUBA: Hmm ok so basically I have confused sincerity with integrity. So ‘I’ can sincerely recognise all those various parts of ‘me’ which are in hiding or opposition but this does not mean that ‘I’ will have integrity. It seems like naiveté is the closest ‘I’ can come to having actual integrity, in that when naive ‘I’ am no longer hiding or in opposition. I think this is what I meant when I wrote that it is a straight line to that mirificent flavour. I think the rest of the post might make more sense when considered in light of ‘me’ looking for the near-integrity of naiveté.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Richard: The purity and perfection of the PCE rekindles one’s naiveté and gives rise to a pure intent, whereupon sincerity, honesty (being scrupulously honest with oneself), prudence, judiciousness, probity, providence and so on easily enable integrity. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Gary, #integrity)

Perhaps start at the beginning – honesty and sincerity. They are both based on “being aligned with factuality/ staying true to facticity”. So whenever you find yourself conjecturing a future scenario, be aware that you veered off into imagination, which is imbued with feeling hope and other seductive ‘good’ feelings and away from sincerity and the wide and wondrous path.

Or if it is a chain of philosophical thoughts as the tail end of a direct experience, stop. Get back to facticity and enjoy and appreciate the experience until some good or bad feeling gets in the way. Then honestly acknowledge that … and you know the rest.

As you can see from Richard’s quote, being honest and sincere is a few steps away from integrity. First things first.

Respondent: I have my OWN commitment to integrity in this investigation, that depends not a whit upon yours.

Richard: If I may suggest? Sincerity is the key to unlock one’s innate naiveté, the nourishing of which is essential if the wondrous magic of life itself is to be apparent, which naiveté effortlessly provides the ‘integrity’ you say you have your own commitment to.

Speaking of which ... did you not notice that I said the commitment was a ‘total dedication to global peace and harmony’ (and not the ‘commitment to integrity’ you make it out to be)?

Just curious. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 46, #sincerity)

KUBA: Integrity is what ‘I’ deeply desire and yet ‘I’ can never quite have it / be it. Looking for integrity via sophistication (the normal way) is obviously a disaster and actual integrity ‘I’ cannot have either. But when naive there is something like a near-integrity, hence that is where ‘I’ finally like ‘myself’ and therefore others. And from that place it is a straight line to the mirificent flavour indeed.

Ah yes that is what ‘I’ am looking for, to ‘be’ that, it is the closest ‘I’ can come to ‘my’ goal of being innocence personified. It is naiveté.

VINEETO: Ha, and because ‘you’ “deeply desire” integrity you conveniently invent a word that is still in ‘your’ territory – “near-integrity”, so that ‘you’ can at least have the label of what ‘you’ “deeply desire”. Why not be sincere and “stay true to facticity”?

There it is again, because it is desire what guides your approach rather than sensibility and being down to earth, you aim for the top without establishing the means to get there. No wonder you have been chasing rainbows (or steeples) rather than making day-to-day inroads into being consistently happy and harmless first? Only solid success can give you the confidence to proceed when you hit the inevitable emotional hurdles. Remember how you achieved your skill in parkour? You couldn’t jump up the highest walls in the beginning without basic training for and patiently developing the skills first.

I say it again for emphasis – actualism is not like the spiritual path where one uses feelings and imagination for achieving lofty realisations. An actual freedom from the human condition is actual, hence you need to actually change, bit by bit. Therefore aiming for the top of what you desire and hoping to ‘wing it’ somehow is not going to work and never will. The experience of, and rememoration of, the “mirificent flavour” of pure intent gives you the intent to actually do something, down-to-earth and practical.

*

VINEETO: Can you lift your game please?

KUBA: Well as I see it right now this means finding a way to remain consistently naïve.

VINEETO: What about “remain consistently” honest and sincere first, as in “being aligned with factuality/ staying true to facticity”? Sincerity is the key, which will then reliably open the lock.

Sincerity also helps you to distinguish between pure intent operating and ‘I’/ ‘me’ having taken over the reigns distorting your direct experience into ‘my’ territory of passionate imagination or rationalising away any occurring objections. These tricks are all part and parcel of the human condition and nobody is immune to it. They have to be squarely recognized as such and addressed whenever they occur.

It is your adventure and you certainly have all the information you need to make the best assessment in every situation (as your next post and the one after indicate).

KUBA: I did wake up this morning experiencing naiveté, very much the flavour that I experienced as a child. I noticed that the “various outlines of ‘me’” had to pull back to allow it and this is where the daring comes in because it’s stepping into new territory, although it is not completely new because I have already experienced naiveté as a child. It’s more that those outlines have been ‘my’ home for so long and now they are being abandoned.

VINEETO: This is great, and much better than your previous “morning gloom” and “evening resentment”, eh? A solid commitment to being sincere will assist you in getting back to naiveté whenever you inadvertently slip out of it … until it becomes second nature.

Cheers Vineeto

November 10 2025

Peter: It seems as though everybody has one particular issue that keeps them holding on – one issue of their social identity that they desperately hold on to and stubbornly refuse to relinquish [Emphasis by Kuba]. (Peter, Actual Freedom List, No. 3b, 11.7.2000)

KUBA: It looks like I have finally found ‘the thing’, after experiencing naivete yesterday I began looking squarely at what was getting in the way of it. It seems so silly writing this out and yet this has been the main thread in all of my objections. It is that I have been unable to contemplate proceeding where the approval/ disapproval of others is no longer the primary reference for my life. Of course where pure intent beckons this is of no ultimate concern but even proceeding towards naivete this is no longer of ultimate concern. I could see this resistance in me, that without the approval/ disapproval of others I simply had no frames of reference, it seemed that it would be an empty life, pointless life, simply because all that I have known thus far is operating under those reference points of how others see me. That mirror of how others see me has been all that I know and to abandon it seems like it would leave me with nothing. This in particular shocked me, just how deeply I rely on how others see me, that I could not even contemplate a life where this is not the primary concern in all that happens.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Just a short note as I found something you may be able to relate to –

Alan:… Today, I wrote a mail to someone, which caused me tonight, while in the bath, to question what I am doing. In writing that mail, and the words above, what am I doing? – seeking approval, desperately wanting someone to say I am doing well, on the right track. Then an investigation into praise – a discovery that all praise achieves is to perpetuate and reinforce ‘my’ existence.

‘Vineeto’: I can well relate to those experiences. The whole time of my ‘mad scientist’ period, I was trying to work out a scheme, a psychic map, symbols and strategies of where I am going and what I am doing. To discover that all those grand experiences were nothing but figments of my imagination was a great blow to the ‘self’ in general and to my orientation in particular. Since then, I think, I lost most of my contact with ‘reality’, at times drifting about in an apparent limbo, because none of the old measures of orientation apply anymore. Very strange indeed. Richard is right, it requires pure intent and nerves of steel, but then, who wants to go back and be ‘normal’ again? Now I seem to be standing firmly on the ground of my senses but with the head and eyes in the thickest fog, unable to locate myself. I have the choice to freak out about it, which I sometimes do, or to adjust to this new situation and enjoy it. I have no idea, if that ‘fog’ will ever settle or if I eventually will stop worrying about it. It’s just another picture of my imagination, after all.

I am not surprised that you are looking for approval and confirmation, that you are on the right track. Going mad all by yourself is a giant task, and I am full of admiration for your courage. I had and have Peter to go mad with together, so it did not seem so weird all the time. A bit like walking on your feet while everyone else is walking on their hands, getting blisters and headaches and finding it perfectly normal. It is weird. I think, from what I read, you are doing very well in your post office in good old England without even a dog to talk common sense to. Quite thrilling too, isn’t it? (Actualism, Vineeto, Actual Freedom List, Alan, 5.1.1999).

VINEETO: And here is a report from Alan and ‘Vineeto’ back in 2001 from before naiveté was operating effortlessly –

Alan: Yes, it is good to be writing again, though it took a huge effort to do so. I guess ‘I’ had found a way of avoiding proceeding further – by sitting back smugly and pretending ‘I’ had done all that was possible and there was nothing more to be done. After all I was virtually without beliefs, virtually without emotions, virtually happy and virtually harmless. Surely that was sufficient? Bullshit! Your reply has encouraged me to continue.

To digress for a moment and expand a bit more on Gary’s question about effort. This is where the ‘effort’ comes in. It is a huge effort for ‘me’ to do anything to change ‘my’self.

‘I’ do not want to do so and it is much easier and more comfortable to retain the status-quo, even though it be epitomised by malice and sorrow. After all, these are the things ‘I’ thrive on. And it is pure intent which gives one the reason and the impetus to make the effort. It is pure intent which provides motivation to get out of ‘stuckness’. <snipped>

And, once one has made the effort of ‘getting off one’s backside’, there is no longer any effort involved at all.

‘Vineeto’: Going by my experiences with whatever I have achieved in life and particularly with the successes that I have had with the method of actualism, I can only say that it always took enormous effort to move out of my initial inertia, apprehension and laziness and apply endeavour, diligence and persistence in order to reach my goal. The process of becoming free from the Human Condition is not something that falls into one’s lap whereby one only needs to stop resisting and then it will all happen by itself. It took courage and a immense stubbornness, that exceeded anything I have ever needed before, to extract myself from all of my inherited and deeply imbibed beliefs and social conditioning and to face and investigate my deepest fears and my wildest passions. The natural tendency of our ‘being’ is to ‘be’, to feel, believe and do as others feel, believe and do, to succumb to the sweet temptation of belonging and to fervently resist change – to ‘stay in existence’ as an entity, as you say. The gravitational force in human beings is to play safe, conform, stay as we are, to be feeling, deeply passionate beings – whereas to become free from being a feeling being requires continuous application of attentiveness, contemplation and effort. (Actualism, Vineeto, Actual Freedom List, Alan-e, 11.6.2001)

Cheers Vineeto