Richard’s Selected Writings on Pure Consciousness Experiences
RICHARD: Are you able to contemplate the atmosphere of your pure consciousness experience? By contemplation I do not mean trying to feel the experience; a peak experience is not a matter of emotions and passions, it is in a realm of its own, as you may remember. Contemplation, to work successfully, needs to be pure … stripped of emotive thought. For a moment allow yourself to set aside – not give up – your psychological state of ‘being’, which is occupied by the latest accumulation of worries and preoccupations. Make all of your identity unimportant, for now, and contemplate the perfection of being here now. Allow this moment to live you, instead of you living in the present. Experience yourself as being the doing of what is happening. An immediate peace and calm emerges and all is wiped clean, allowing a three-hundred-and-sixty degree awareness to operate. It is like having eyes in the back of your head. In this clean atmosphere you can freely allow the pure quality of the immediacy of this moment to become paramount. It is of itself not at all concerned with the culturally defined personality you were just before; it takes no notice of any ‘problem’ that has just been plaguing you and is calmly unperturbed by any psychological interference. Instantly the friendly solution to all humankind’s problems lies open all around. It is a condition which cannot be mistaken as anything else than authentic, as it is your very character. It is the simple, actual quality of the universe itself … it is a magical world … a fairytale-like wonderland. In this, the actual world, love, worship and adulation – the whole Spiritual gamut of surrender and obedience – do not play a role. Divinity has become obsolete as a solution, because what you are seeing and experiencing now is pre-eminent. An intimacy closer than you have ever been with yourself, as you normally are, has replaced everything else … this kind familiarity has superseded all what humans have ever believed as being The Truth.
This is actuality, this, the world as-it-is, this is what you actually are.
Q(1): You have often said: ‘Let the moment live you’. Is this the same as when you say: ‘I am doing what is happening’?
Q: Yes, fall into tune with the moment … this moment is living everything, including me. You see that you don’t have to do it any more – you don’t have to maintain yourself. That’s such a relief: not to have to maintain yourself … then everything comes easily. You just … happen! I am happening to talk, we are happening to be sitting here, [Laughter] we are just all happening.
R: Yes, I do not have to beat my heart or breathe my breath. I do not fill my bladder – it fills of itself.
RICHARD: [..] After fascination comes obsession wherein one cannot leave it alone any more – or rather it does not leave one alone – and that is when that tempo picks ‘me’ up and ‘I’ am borne along on the adventure of a lifetime as it is inevitable that one is to meet one’s destiny … it being what one is here for.
An eagerness takes over – one feels alive, vital, dynamic – and things happen serendipitously such that ‘I’ can no longer distinguish between ‘me’ doing it and it happening to ‘me’ … and this is exhilarating for one is fully doing this business of being alive – doing it here on earth in this lifetime as this body – and it is all happening now of its own accord. This moment is happening and all the while one is doing it the doing is happening of itself … then one is the experiencing of the happening.
And this is wonderful.
PETER: I always like being conscious of doing what is happening – one is then in the only place one can be – here; and when your here it can only be now. It’s the very cutting edge … to be in the Actual World.
R: Ripples of pleasure throughout your entire body. From the tips of your toes to the top of your head. The sheer pleasure of being alive, of being here doing this business of living this moment. Does it seem like it does away with the need to have a sexual orgasm?
Q: Well … yes [laughter]. I never thought I would say that! It’s like I’m orgastic all the time. It’s not of my doing, it happens of itself.
PETER: There seems to be a very deep-set misunderstanding that arises even from the running of the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive??’ for the traditional approach would be – am ‘I’ feeling safe and comfortable ‘inside’ this body despite what is happening in the rock-solid world ‘out there’? This approach to the question merely perpetuates the self as an entity that is separate from the actual world, it does nothing to actively demolish and break down the barriers that prevents one as a mortal flesh and blood body being fully immersed in and engaged in the business of doing what is happening, right here and now in the physical, rock-solid actual world. This actual freedom is 180 degrees opposite to the spiritual freedom which is the escape from being here, right now in this only moment one can experience being alive.
[..] We were chatting the other day about the marked difference between being here, doing what is happening and the feeling of not being here that can cause a frustration with life as-it-is. The frustration with life as-it-is, right here and now, most often causes a passionate desire to be somewhere else which serves only to prevent one from being here. For an actualist, any period of time spent not being here is clearly a waste of time. Any time spent being bored, angry, pissed off, feeling sad, lack luster, annoyed, etc. is time wasted time lost from fully living this the only moment one can experience being alive. All of these ‘time-offs’ have to be explored and investigated and understood so as to prevent the same old ‘time-outs’ occurring in the future. It takes a bit of practice and a lot of effort and attention as to ‘how’ am I experiencing this moment of being alive, but pretty soon one gets the hang of it.
Soon one finds that a switch has been made from being resentful at having to be here to resenting and wanting to eliminate whatever it is that prevents one from being here.
[Peter]: For me the main event is always here and now, which means if I am living with someone then I have no concern about when, how or if it will end. If I am not happy now, if I am annoyed, moody, discontent, out of it, lacklustre, sad or whatever then I am somewhere else but here and now, not doing what is happening in this moment of time. By fully taking on board the fact that this very moment is the only moment I can experience, means that I have abandoned the idea of postponement. For me there is no end of this relationship for, if it happens, it is not happening now. The exquisiteness and sensual delight of being here, doing what is happening, means the ending of the idea that I am coming from somewhere or that I am going somewhere. Freedom lies in being absolutely locked into, and fully committed to this very moment of time – to fully embrace being a flesh and blood human being on this paradisiacal material earth.
– Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Alan
VINEETO: The main fuel for this feeling of impatience comes from the notion that there is something better ‘out there’, in the future – that magic ingredient that will then make life as perfect as the ending of children’s fairytale – and then they lived happily ever after. And yet it is this very feeling of impatience, that particular bit of my ‘self’, that prevents me from the sensate-only experiencing the perfection of this moment.
[..] So impatience gets replaced by an understanding of redundancy – the more I experientially understand about the human condition the more ‘I’ become redundant because life in the actual world is utterly safe and already perfect. ‘I’ am not needed to stay alive. The more I understand the chemical, psychological and psychic programming of the brain, the more I can see that this programming is outdated, faulty and redundant in every single aspect – ‘I’ am not needed at all. Virtual Freedom is the ongoing increasing experience of ‘my’ redundancy, kind of getting used to not interfering with perfection. The way I see it now is that death is simply an extension of this continuing discovery of ‘me’, the spoiler, being redundant, turning 98% redundancy to 99% and 99% to 100% … … pop.
The only way I can reach this 100% redundancy is by being here all the time, doing what is happening without emotionally interfering – and if there is an emotion, then investigating it, nutting it out, sitting it out, thinking it through, understanding its follies and furphies. In the end, every emotion is understood as nothing but an objection to and fear of being here – and an objection to being redundant as an entity.
Richard: It happens on its own in that, as ‘I’ am the instinctual passions and the instinctual passions are ‘me’, there is no way that ‘I’ can end ‘me’. What ‘I’ do is that ‘I’ deliberately and consciously and with knowledge aforethought set in motion a ‘process’ that will ensure ‘my’ demise. What ‘I’ do, voluntarily and willingly, is to press the button – which is to acquiesce – which precipitates an oft-times alarming but always thrilling momentum that will result in ‘my’ inevitable self-immolation. The acquiescing is that one thus dedicates oneself to being here as the universe’s experience of itself now … it is the unreserved !YES! to being alive as this flesh and blood body. Peace-on-earth is the inevitable result of such devotion because it is already here … it is always here now. ‘I’ and/or ‘me’ was merely standing in the way of the always already existing perfect purity from becoming apparent by sitting back and moaning and groaning about the inequity of it all (as epitomised in ‘I didn’t ask to be born’). How can one be forever sticking one’s toe in and testing out the waters and yet expect to be able to look at oneself in the mirror each morning with dignity. The act of initiating this ‘process’ – acquiescence – is to embrace death.
RICHARD: The activity of attentiveness reminds one of why one is doing this: in actualism, one puts one’s attention on being here … now. When feelings cause one’s awareness to wander from actualism’s focus, it is attentiveness that reminds one that one’s mind is being manipulated … and why one is doing this happening called being alive. It is attentiveness that brings one back to the object of actualism: apperception.
– The Why And What of Attentiveness And Sensuousness And Apperceptiveness
PETER: The commonly held belief is that the excitement and tension that results from instinctual fear is essential to feeling alive and many actively court danger in order to ride the rush of fear. Contrary to this belief, the experience of the near-elimination of instinctual fear allows the thrill of doing what is happening to become increasingly apparent – and this includes doing nothing really well. Again it is universally upheld as a truth that one needs the instinct of aggression, currently manifest in the phrase ‘standing up for my rights’, or else I will be trampled, done in, taken advantage of, etc. What is discovered is quite the opposite, for one increasingly discovers that the actual world is a safe place, brim full of serendipity, delight and wonder.
VINEETO: I am currently attempting to understand the process of approaching death, the combination of self-immolation and doing what is happening. I have always been puzzled by the apparent paradox of the fact that only ‘I’ can bring about my demise and the question how the last bit of ‘me’ is going to disappear. This is how I experience it now –
Sometimes, in the course of a perfect day, ‘I’ have a more substantial experience of an emotion, usually felt as fear, tension in the head or/and in the stomach area. Over the period of the last weeks I have come to understand my own journey as less of a ‘psychic and psychological search and destroy mission’ and more of as a physical affair, where thebrain is sorting out the necessary neuron-links to adjust to the dismantling of ‘me’. And the only thing that ‘I’ can do now to support my self-immolation process is to get out of the road, to not stand on the brakes. The process is happening and so, for freedom’s sake, Vineeto, get off the brakes!
I do that by neither dramatising the fear nor pushing it away, by seeing it more as a by-product of this strange thing I am doing. I don’t ‘support’ a panic-attack by embroidering it, and neither do I let myself be numb, bored or dull. Then, by quietly noticing what is happening, without attaching any identity to an ‘observer’, apperception happens – with some rumbling going on in the background – while I get on with the pleasures of being here, be they food, sex, a walk into town, playing with the web-site, interaction with other people, going to work or watching television. And by ‘my’ stepping out of the way I am doing what is happening, any rumbling or grinding in the background included.
SRID: the opposite of feeling vulnerable is that one becomes interested in people and events happening right now. during the day we first met grace, i remember using the expression of ‘doing of what is happening’ to richard upon noticing that there was ‘less of me’ as i was, for most part, simply being the felicitous interaction happening on the house boat. closer to the end of the trip i also confirmed that this is the direction to take in order to get to out-from-control/ different-way-of-being.
– Srid : Report on Mailing List D about his Meeting with Richard, Vineeto and Peter
PETER: You need a good deal of gas in the tank initially and eventually you’ll come to a stage when you find yourself careering along, looking for the brakes and finding there are none. Then, as soon as you dare to, you take your hands off the wheel and sit back and be aware of doing what is happening and amazement, wonder and delight come flooding in to fill the hole that is left when ‘you’ temporarily abdicate the throne. When you do this often enough, and find that the actual world is not only safe but pure and perfect, you become aware of your destiny.
– Peter’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List with Gary