Felicity and Innocuity

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. Humour is essential – it is inevitable in an actual freedom – and one has a lot of fun along the way. An actual freedom is all about having fun; about enjoying being here; 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 … most people resent being here and wish to escape. This method will bring one into being more fully here than anyone has ever been before. If you do not want to be here, then forget it.

RICHARD: It is the very fact of physical death – everybody alive today on this planet will eventually be dead – which ensures happiness and harmlessness … if everything alive today were to all-of-a-sudden endure forever then everything would matter in the long-term (everything would be of enduring importance (in this ultimate sense) and, therefore, life would be a serious business.

RICHARD: The other aspect of the actualism method – other than felicity/ innocuity – is sensuosity: feeling felicitous/ innocuous, each moment again, brings one closer to one’s senses and the resultant wonder at the brilliance of the sensate world can enable apperception … the direct experience of the world as-it-is.

Furthermore, do you understand that to be living this moment – the only moment you are ever alive – by feeling bad is to be frittering away a vital opportunity to be fully alive … to totally enjoy and appreciate being what you indubitably are (a sensate creature) whilst you are here on this planet?

RICHARD: No, the utter reliability of being always happy and harmless replaces the onerous burden of being responsible … and actuality’s blithe sincerity dispenses with the gloomy seriousness that epitomises adulthood.

Being a ‘Software Test Engineer’ in Windows Vista, I was sitting in the Richmond office close to 5pm, working on C++ tests - which at that time was the most boring thing I could be doing that I hated it! Then, somehow, my mind without any prompt ‘slipped’ into higher-gears of some sort where everything started functioning smoothly. This so-called menial task had became a neutral ‘mental activity’ and my awareness of it took a magical turn … in that, I started appreciating the various nooks and crannies of ‘the brain in operation’. At this meta level, the interest-level of the task did not matter - because the very fact that the brain is working on it in its intricate levels was so wonderful to observe. I was able to work on the task most effectively, and while enjoying it thoroughly, with a complete 360 degrees awareness of it as it was happening (and there was a total immediacy, unlike the traditional modality of ‘me’ being ‘up there somewhere’ lost in some semi-fancy despite being physically located here).

RICHARD: What the word ‘harmless’ refers to, on both The Actual Freedom Trust web site and mailing list, is being sans malice – just as being happy refers to being without sorrow – thus provided there be no malice generating/driving/motivating one’s thoughts, words, or actions, being no longer capable of fulfilling a previously made pledge can in no way be going against being harmless.

Such imitative felicity/ innocuity, in conjunction with sensuosity, readily evokes amazement, marvel, and delight – a state of wide-eyed wonder best expressed by the word naiveté (the nearest a ‘self’ can come to innocence whilst being a ‘self’) – and which allows the overarching benignity and benevolence inherent to the infinitude, which this infinite and eternal and perpetual universe actually is, to operate more and more freely. This intrinsic benignity and benevolence, which has nothing to do with the imitative affective happiness and harmlessness, will do the rest.

Richard: To get out of ‘stuckness’ one gets off one’s backside and does whatever one knows best to activate delight. Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity/ innocuity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all … and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life … the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is … and one is the experiencing of what is happening. But refrain from possessing it and making it your own … or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared.

Plus the more one enjoys and appreciates being alive simply by being here, each moment again for as much as is humanly possible (editor: See Actualism Method), the lower the cost-of-living becomes as less and less discretionary spending is used-up in purchased entertainment, in socialising expenditure (e.g., fashion-house attire, designer-driven accoutrements, status-displaying automobiles, and etcetera), in mood-enhancement payments, in novelty-seeking travel costs, and so on and so forth.

• [Richard]: ‘The latter advice relates to consciously experiencing whatever it is which is preventing happiness and harmlessness (less it all be but a detached/ disassociated intellectual exercise) … for example: [Richard]: ‘It is impossible for one to intelligently observe what is going on within if one does not at the same time acknowledge the occurrence of one’s various feeling-tones with attentiveness. This is especially true with the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful). In order to observe one’s own fear, for instance, one must admit to the fact that one is afraid. Nor can one examine one’s own depression, for another example, without acknowledging it fully. The same is true for irritation and agitation and frustration and all those other uncomfortable emotional and passionate moods. One cannot examine something fully if one is busy denying its existence’

RICHARD: [..] as the many and various emotions/ passions are the same affective energy, at root, then directing all of that affective energy into being the felicitous/ innocuous feelings (that is, ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being, which is ‘being’ itself), via minimisation of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and maximisation of the happy and harmless feelings, will have the effect of involuntarily radiating felicitous/ innocuous vibes and currents as a matter of course.

It is really very, very simple (which is possibly why it has never been discovered before this): you felt good previously; you are not feeling good now; something happened to you to end that felicitous/ innocuous feeling; you find out what happened; you see how silly that is (no matter what it was); you are once more feeling good. —Richard

R: At the root itself, "you" are that feeling; whichever the feeling is, that’s what “you” are; right at the very root of everything ("I" am "my" feelings and "my" feelings are "me" is the way to look at it). The only way to completely and utterly get rid of feelings is to get rid of “yourself”, because it is one and the same thing. What the identity inside this body did all those years ago was, by being attentive to what was happening each moment again, got into the habit of feeling as happy and harmless as is humanly possible, which meant that the other feelings didn’t get a look-in. That’s the primary way that the whole method works.

RICHARD: [..] Look, the whole point of minimising both the malicious/ sorrowful feelings (the ‘bad’ feelings) and their antidotal loving/ compassionate feelings (the ‘good’ feelings) whilst maximising the felicitous/ innocuous feelings (the ‘congenial’ feelings) is to make for a potent combination when this untrammelled conviviality operates in conjunction with a naïve sensuosity – whereby one is both likeable and liking – such that the benevolence and benignity of pure intent may increasingly become dynamically enabled for one purpose and one purpose alone … to wit: for the already always existing peace-on-earth to become apparent, in this lifetime, as this flesh-and-blood body. http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/selectedcorrespondence/sc-intimacy.htm