Excitement

Fear – We all know it at nauseam; it includes trickery, cunningness, numbness, confusion, escape, denial, excuses, guilt and beliefs in all kinds of good (helpful) and bad (harming) spirits. And, of course, there are panic, terror and good old dread and the escape into enlightenment. But fear is also the doorway to courage, thrill and excitement to reach closer and closer to one’s destiny.

I found dullness and boredom one of the most common reactions to being alive when things weren’t going ‘my’ way – and they rarely ever did or that life wasn’t exciting, which it rarely was. In the process of actualism I recognized, however, that my habitual resentment towards the various facts of life, for instance having to work 🏢 for a living, bad weather, getting sick, etc, clearly prevented me from becoming happy and harmless. I discovered I could either indulge in ‘my’ resentment or pull myself up by my boot strings and break this insidious habit. As No 3 pointed out, it was indeed a matter of priority – and I chose sensuous attentiveness over ‘self’-indulgent apathy, happiness over resentment.

It is an adventure and a delight to simply be alive, when one is free from the ‘I’ that has taken control of one’s body; the hunt for the ‘thrills and spills’ that is so endemic in the real world is over. It is ‘I’ who is easily bored, incessantly pursuing excitement. As ‘I’ am not actually here, one needs to feel that ‘I’ am real … that one is ‘alive’. The body can be persuaded to produce quite an array of chemicals; a veritable cocktail is available to the insidious entity that has taken up psychological and psychic residence within. Whereas I am already alive for I am actual. I am never bored, because being here now as-I-am is an escapade in itself. It takes great daring to be here now; anyone who has heeded my words and contemplated the actuality of what I am saying and doing, has reported to me that they invariably experience fear … and I too have known the full gamut of the anxious terror and horror and dread of the existential angst that comes as a result of activating the desire to disclose oneself as the contingent ‘being’ one fears one is. Initially one is deathly afraid to actually be here now, as it can feel rather rudely raw … one feels more naked and exposed than taking off one’s clothing in the market place.

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.

RICHARD: Properly speaking the word ‘altruistic’ is not a word for a feeling but a word for behaviour or action that benefits others at the expense of self (altruism is the very antithesis of selfism), such as fighting to the death to protect the young, defend the group or secure the territory, and as such could evoke any number of feelings … such as fear, thrill, courage, excitement, exhilaration, euphoria and so on.