Identity

http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/default.htm

RICHARD: [..] the single root cause of all the mayhem and misery that epitomises the human condition is the persistent feeling of being an identity inhabiting the body: an affective ‘entity’ as in a deep, abiding and profound feeling of being an occupant, a tenant, a squatter or a phantom hiding behind a façade, a mask, a persona; as a subjective emotional psychological ‘self’ and/or a passionate psychic ‘being’ (‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul) inhabiting the psyche; a deep feeling of being a ‘spirit’; a consciousness of the immanence of ‘presence’ (which exists immortally); an awareness of being an autological ‘being’ … the realisation of ‘Being’ itself. In other words: everything you think, feel and instinctually know yourself to be … is to be an alien in an alien world.


http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/frequentquestions/FAQ30a.htm

RESPONDENT: My view of this is that the mind directs the body and something behind the mind directs the mind.

RICHARD: Yes … for 6.0 billion people this ‘something behind the mind’ is their genetic identity (‘being’) echoing through the millennia via the germ cells (the spermatozoa and the ova).

RESPONDENT: How can an identity be genetic? A body can be genetic … not an identity.

RICHARD: Any metaphysical identity (a psychological, emotional, psychic or autological ‘being’) is an epiphenomenon of the rudimentary animal ‘self’ that forms itself, out of survival necessity, as the centre-point of the instinctual passions that blind nature genetically encodes in all sentient beings at conception in the genes … ‘I’ am the current end-point of myriads of survivors passing on their genes. ‘I’ am the product of the ‘success story’ of blind nature’s instinctual passions such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire.

Being born of the biologically inherited instinctual passions genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically speaking – umpteen tens of thousands of years old … ‘my’ origins are lost in the mists of pre-history. ‘I’ am so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed … carried along on the reproductive cell-line, over countless millennia, from generation to generation. And ‘I’ am thus passed on into an inconceivably open-ended and hereditably transmissible future. In other words: ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’; ‘I’ am aggression and aggression is ‘me’; ‘I’ am nurture and nurture is ‘me’; ‘I’ am desire and desire is ‘me’ and so on. This is one’s ‘Original Face’ (to use the Zen terminology); this is the source of the ‘we are all one’ feeling that is accessed in spiritual practices and mystical mediation.

Because, genetically speaking we are indeed ‘all one’ inasmuch as all carbon based life-forms – not just sentient life-forms – have a common hereditary ‘survival instincts’ origin.


RICHARD: With the hormonal power of the feelings engendered, one feels that a ‘me’ exists … generally felt to be somewhere in the region of the heart. This is the ‘me’ that I consistently call the soul … for convenience. This feeling – and feelings are so powerful that they can override intelligence – makes one think that an ‘I’ exists … generally located in the head. This ‘I’, which for convenience I consistently call the ego, [..]


RICHARD: The human animal, with the unique ability to know its impending demise has taken the awareness of being this rudimentary self and blown it up all out of proportion into a feeling identity, an affective ‘being’ … no animal has a ‘me’ as a soul in the heart.

Let alone an ‘I’ as an ego in the head.


RICHARD: ‘my’ survival being paramount could not be further from the truth, for ‘I’ need play no part any more in perpetuating physical existence (which is the primal purpose of the instinctual animal ‘self’). ‘I’ am no longer necessary at all. In fact, ‘I’ am nowadays a hindrance. With all of ‘my’ beliefs, values, creeds, ethics and other doctrinaire disabilities, ‘I’ am a menace to the body. ‘I’ am ready to die (to allow the body to be killed) for a cause and ‘I’ will willingly sacrifice physical existence for a ‘Noble Ideal’ … and reap ‘my’ post-mortem reward: immortality.

That is how real ‘I’ am … which is why both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul must die a real death (but not physically into the grave) to find out the actuality.

See also

Links to this page
  • Wiliness of the wild

    RICHARD: Wherever there be no underestimating the extent to which a lost, lonely, frightened and very, very cunning feeling-being will go in order to remain affectively-psychically in existence – millions upon millions of years of blind nature’s successful perpetuation of the species via its rough-and-ready instinctual survival passions blindly dictates no other course of action can ever instinctually come about – is where there be far less likelihood of ascribing to nescience that which quite properly has its roots in the visceral wiliness of the wild which has so successfully proliferated the species thus far.

  • 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.

    Richard: This social identity, which is otherwise known as a conscience (a moral/ethical and principled entity, with inculcated societal knowledge of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’), is overlaid upon the instinctual identity itself … and its associated personae consist of (for example):

  • Seriousness

    RICHARD: As the process of becoming serious occurs during puberty – when the biological imperative kicks in big-time – it thus runs very deep and is fundamental to the make-up of ‘my’ adulthood.

  • S.N.A.G.

    Being a good, kind-hearted, moral and ‘caring’ man at the time it was difficult for me to see this behaviour in myself, or even acknowledge that this was ‘me’ in action, let alone want to put an end to it. For the ending of anger – causing ripples – is the ending of ‘me’. I used the term ‘causing ripples’ in my journal deliberately for I was nearly always able to control my anger – and most other emotions – and, as such, have not indulged in fights or violent acts, let alone verbal arguments, competitive sports, etc. I was a S.N.A.G., a wimp, a pacifist, a nice guy. When I came across Richard and his journal it was the harmless in ‘happy and harmless’ that was really appealing, for I knew that although I was a nice guy I could not honestly say I was harmless. In all my relationships, I knew that was as much the cause of dis-harmony as the other.

  • Rememoration

    Thus, in conjunction with those ‘making present’ words [i.e., ‘presentiate’, ‘presentially’, and etcetera], I now have the linguistic means to vividly communicate how feeling-being ‘Richard’ (…) utilised that rememorative-presentiation process to imbue/ suffuse ‘his’ day-to-day life with the ambience/ the flavour/ the appeal of the Pure Consciousness Experience and thus invigorate and vitalise ‘his’ moment-to-moment experiencing as well.

  • Pure Contemplation

    RICHARD: Pure contemplation is not thinking ‘about’ something … which is the usual way of thought. Pure contemplation does not take a duration of time. It is instant thought, a realisation, a flash of seeing. In pure contemplation ‘I’ do no thinking … thinking does itself. ‘I’ have no substance, therefore in pure contemplation there is thinking without a ‘thinker’. Thought operates freely … and in immaculate wonder. Pure contemplation is a state of unsullied wonderment: ‘how can this world happen?’, or ‘what is this universe doing here?’, or ‘where does this body come from?’. These questions are posed in such a way so as not to get a thought-out answer, but to simply wonder, in a pure contemplation of the actual. One stays with the notion: ‘I am this body’ and regards that magical world of the PCE. Opening up to that fairy tale-like world by seeing that it is indeed possible now makes it close … so close as to be already here. It is always already here. Regard the very best as possible for oneself … and for all human beings. There is a must in pure contemplation that something amazing can happen: all of a sudden ‘I’ am no more and the actual is already here. I am here where I always have been. http://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/selectedwriting/sw-universe.htm

  • Pure Consciousness Experience

    A PCE is when one’s sense of identity temporarily vacates the throne and apperception occurs.

  • Procrastination

    RICHARD: For the same reason why it is not happened for anybody else … in the end all ‘I’ can do is procrastinate.

  • Native intelligence

    RICHARD: One’s native intelligence cannot operate and function cleanly and clearly whilst ‘I’ am in there trying to run the show. The nearest thing to what I call native intelligence is known as commonsense in the ‘real world’. Intuition, be it of the NDA variety, or any other variety is affectively-based … thus you would be relying on the notoriously unreliable feelings to be the arbiter of what is appropriate or inappropriate action.

  • Modern Rationality

    Being artful often takes the form of armchair sophistry* (“gish gallop” for instance) in rationalists. Like anyone with an identity, native intelligence does not always operate and function cleanly and clearly on the movement’s members, despite well-meaning efforts and intentions.

  • Modern Physics

    What’s going on here, ultimately, is that we take our own self-centric perception and apply it to the universe at large.

  • Instinctual Treadmill

    RICHARD: Incidentally, the ‘being’ who possessed this flesh and blood body all those years ago found it quite disturbing when he realised, one fine afternoon after the birth of ‘his’ fourth and last child, that to be born, to learn to walk, talk, and so on, to go to school, to get a job/obtain a career, to get married/be in a relationship, to acquire a home, to have children, to teach them to walk, talk, and so on, to send them to school, to have them get a job/obtain a career, to ensure they get married/have a relationship, to have them acquire a home, to encourage them have children, to see them teach their children to walk, talk, and so on – and so on and so on almost ad infinitum – was nothing other than an instinctual treadmill, an inborn/inherent conveyor belt which carried generation after generation inexorably from birth to death, stretching all the way back from an indeterminate inception and heading towards an open-ended conclusion … and all for what?

  • Hypnopompic state

    RICHARD: [..] it was the hypnopompic state which revealed the essence of who ‘I’ am – the precise nature of ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being (which is ‘being’ itself)

  • Humanity Unorthodox

    An Actual Freedom (i.e., “self”-immolation) makes everything else so blasé in comparison, as nothing else offers the ultimate and thorough betterment of humanity. This section of my website is a different kind of index into the Actual Freedom website that acts as an easy ‘portal’, and as well as serves as atomic notes (of 📓 Zettelkasten kind) for linking to from elsewhere.

    Start from Actualism Method if you wish to get to the nitty-gritty of what this is all about (the “method” is to segue into the “actualism process” which culminates in “self”-immolation) … or browse the various notes below.

  • How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?

    In other words the focus is upon how identity in toto is standing in the way of the already always existing peace-on-earth being apparent just here right now.

  • Harmlessness

    VINEETO: The reason I said that there is a remarkable difference between feeling harmless and actually being harmless is because it is easy to assess one’s happiness by checking if I am feeling happy whereas many people may feel themselves to be harmless when they are not experiencing feelings of aggression or anger against somebody. Yet they are nevertheless causing harm via their thoughtless ‘self’-oriented instinctual feelings and actions, something that all human beings are prone to do unless they become fully aware of their instinctual passions before these translate into vibes and/or actions.

  • Grace’s scale of different ways of being

    The gradations of ‘her’ scale were, basically, good, very good, great, excellent, and perfect – whereby, in regards to intimacy, ‘good’ related to togetherness (which pertains to being and acting in concert with another); ‘very good’ related to closeness (where personal boundaries expand to include the other); ‘great’ related to sweetness (delighting in the pervasive proximity, or immanence, of the other)*; ‘excellent’ related to richness (a near-absence of agency; with the [sophisticate] doer abeyant, and the [naïve] beer ascendant, being the experiencing is inherently cornucopian); and ‘perfect’ related to magicality (neither beer nor doer extant; pristine purity abounds and immaculate perfection prevails) – all of which correlate to the range of naïveness from being sincere to becoming naïve and all the way through being naïveté itself* to an actual innocence.

  • Gender Ideology

    In other words, all the fuss and pother dominating current-affairs about 101-plus personal pronouns – made regulatory law, even, in some fiefdoms (e.g., the Canadian regulatory kerfuffle over Prof. Jordan Peterson et alia) – as well as males asseverating* gender-dysphoria competing in women’s sports, and nondiscriminatory access to public toilets and change-rooms, and the suchlike, along with the antisemitic-style taking offence laws and/or regulations (as in ‘hate-speech’ laws), promulgated and promoted by the unelected and unaccountable United Nations bureaucrats and rapporteurs, stems from and revolves cyclonically around none other than this phantasmal* “social construct” of a gender-identity (a.k.a. “sexual orientation identity” as explained in detail on pages 4-5 of the August 2009 “Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation” paper from the ‘American Psychological Association’, August 2009*).

    This sexualised gender-identity became socio-politicised when ‘gender feminism’ and ‘identity politics’ in particular gained traction due to clamorous ‘anti-discrimination’ vocalists and vociferous ‘equalitarian’ activists stridently cashing in on their minoritarian victimology socio-politico influence and its resultant lobbying pressure [..]

  • Felicity and Innocuity

    [Richard]: ’The felicitous/innocuous feelings are in no way docile, lack-lustre affections … in conjunction with sensuosity they make for an extremely forceful/ potent combination as, with all of the affective energy channelled into being as happy and harmless as is humanly possible (and no longer being frittered away on love and compassion/ malice and sorrow), the full effect of ‘me’ at the core of ‘my’ being – which is 'being' itself – is dynamically enabled for one purpose and one purpose alone. (…) The actualism method is not about undermining the passions … on the contrary, it is about 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) in order to effect a deliberate imitation of the actual, as evidenced in a PCE, so as to feel as happy and as harmless (as free of malice and sorrow) as is humanly possibly whilst remaining a ‘self’.

  • Excellence Experience

    RICHARD: [as to] how the intimacy experience (IE) differs from an excellence experience (EE): qualitively they are much the same, or similar, insofar as with both experiences there is a near-absence of agency – the beer rather than the doer is the operant – whereupon naïveté has come to the fore, such as to effect the marked diminishment of separation, and the main distinction is that the IE is more people-oriented, while the EE tends to be environmental in its scope.

  • Equity and parity

    The integrity of intent born out of the intensity of this once-in-a-lifetime ‘starting-point’ question precipitates unilateral action which is not of ‘my’ doing once set in motion … because, at root, it is ‘me’ who is the problem. Thus thought may or may not play a part in it depending upon the circumstances, each moment again, in one’s daily life. This ‘action’ is a neurological process occurring in the skull (specifically at the top of the brain-stem) that gathers a momentum of its own accord … ‘me’ thinking and feeling may aid or hinder this process from time-to-time but essentially, once one sets the action in motion, the neurological process does the trick itself.

  • Conventional Time

    I am aware that my words are being hijacked, as it were, by an identity – and thus turned into concepts – forever locked-out of time and accordingly draw a distinction between what the word ‘time’ refers to in the real world (a flow or a movement of the arena, so to speak, in which events occur) and what is actually happening (it is never not this moment) as a prompt for direct experience (there is a vast stillness here).

  • Community

    One’s psychological existence is so precarious that one needs constant endorsement, so as to feel that ‘I’ am alive, that ‘I’ still exist. When the ‘whole’ accuses one of being selfish – which it relentlessly does by extolling the virtues of duty, obligation and responsibility – one can then chastise oneself, thus maintaining one’s sense of being a social identity. With suitable remorse, one has then been coerced, cajoled and shamed into having one’s usefulness to the community restored … and one feels needed again. Nonetheless, one is actually crazy to chastise oneself because ‘I’ am selfish by ‘my’ very created nature … and ‘I’ will always be self-centred. Self-castigation only serves to crystallise ‘me’. It is essential to the community’s ‘well-being’ that ‘I’ remain selfish. Because the ‘whole’, having created ‘me’ so as to perpetuate its own existence – and being utterly selfish itself – desperately needs self-centred members. ‘I’ readily invest, morally, in the community for there one recognises one’s ilk … ‘I’ am a lonely soul and it is essential that ‘I’ have a sense of belonging to the like-minded ‘whole’. It is an illusion of togetherness designed to assuage the feeling of aloneness that both oneself and the community experiences … ‘I’ and ‘humanity’ feel lost and lonely in what is perceived to be the vast reaches of space and time that make up an empty universe. The search for extra-terrestrial life is but one outcome of this feeling of separation.

  • Climate Alarmism

    Both feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ and feeling-being ‘Peter’ minimised their respective income-streams, within a year or so, but that was more because they valued their time over money than any other reason.

    For decades, the very people who support these models have been telling people we’re just a few short years away from the demise* of the species…only for nothing to happen (and for the very things they claim to be getting worse, actually getting better). Again, and again, and again. First it was global warming, then it was “climate change” (hint: the climate always changes—the real subtext here is Malthusian discontent for humanity, not a desire to protect nature).

    [Richard]: ‘Have you ever noticed that many an otherwise intelligent person has been afflicted by the doomsday syndrome all throughout human history?
    If so, the words ‘all throughout human history’ should speak for themselves [in regards the end of the world being nigh].
    The doom being felt – and projected onto the world at large – is, of course, ‘my’ own doom: there is no way out, ‘I’ am doomed. ‘I’ must, inevitably, cease to ‘be’. Instead of bemoaning ‘my’ fate and vainly searching for an escape, ‘I’ can see ‘myself’ for what ‘I’ am. This seeing is the beginning of the ending of ‘me’. The extinction of ‘me’ is the ultimate sacrifice ‘I’ can make to ensure the possibility of peace-on-earth for not only this body but all bodies.
    Have you ever desired oblivion?’

    “Climate change” alarmism (aka. climate apocalyptic fantasy) is the current iteration of the long line of religiously* catastrophistic thinking* humanity has been harbouring for generations, which alarmism has its origins in identity itself inasmuch as fear itself is sourced in it.

  • Caring

    RICHARD: That is partly so – an unselfish ‘self’ is still a ‘self’ nevertheless and is perforce ‘self’-centred in all its activities – but there is also the factor of just who it is that is caring for who it is that is being cared for to take into account. In other words: it is an illusory identity inside one body which is caring for an illusory identity in another body. Which is what the born-again people in the above example were (futilely) attempting to do … and I say ‘futilely’ because there is no entity inside this flesh and blood body to be stroked by their blandishments.

  • “Believing in itself”

    For is it not a fact that ‘I’ am nothing but a belief? Do ‘I’ not arise out of the act of believing in itself? The action of believing is to emotionally imagine something to be real that is not actual. When one observes oneself in action, ‘I’ seem to be real – very real at times – but am ‘I’ actual? Am ‘I’ actual, as in tangible, corporeal, material, substantial, palpable? No?

    RICHARD: Unfortunately it is not such a simple matter as merely exposing and dropping beliefs and misconceptions. I would suggest asking who is doing the exposing and dropping. I would enquire into just who is holding the beliefs and misconceptions concerning an on-going self. ‘I’ cannot drop the belief that ‘I’ exist because ‘I’, the would-be ‘dropper’, am what is to be dropped. Like-wise, ‘I’ the would-be ‘exposer’, am what is to be exposed. Only apperceptive awareness will do the trick.

  • Basic Resentment

    PETER: [..] an essential first step is to take a long look at one’s own deeply-ingrained resentment at being born and having to be here. If one cares to break this habit of feeling resentful – and avoid the traditional antidotal trap of feeling gratitude to Someone or Something – the fact that one no longer feels resentful for being here disempowers the very driving force for one’s resentfulness towards one’s fellow human beings together with feelings such as anger, pity, jealousy and envy. The accompanying essential step is to stop focussing one’s attention on how you perceive, as in intuitively feel, others to be and to start paying exclusive attention to the only person whose feelings, intentions, sincerity and integrity you can know for certain – ‘me’.

  • Apperception

    When one first becomes aware of something there is a fleeting instant of pure perception of sensum, just before one affectively identifies with all the feeling memories associated with its qualia (the qualities pertaining to the properties of the form) and also before one cognitively recognises the percept (the mental product or result of perception), and this ‘raw sense-datum’ stage of sensational perception is a direct experience of the actual. Pure perception is at that instant where one converges one’s eyes or ears or nose or tongue or skin on the thing. It is that moment just before one focuses one’s feeling-memory on the object. It is the split-second just as one hedonically subjectifies it … which is just prior to clamping down on it viscerally and segregating it from pure, conscious existence. Pure perception takes place sensitively just before one starts feeling the percept – and thus thinking about it affectively – which takes place just before one’s feeling-fed mind says: ‘It’s a man’ or: ‘It’s a woman’ or: ‘It’s a steak-burger’ or: ‘It’s a tofu-burger’ … with all that is implied in this identification and the ramifications that stem from that. This fluid, soft-focused moment of bare awareness, which is not learned, has never been learned, and never will be learned, could be called an aesthetically sensual regardfulness or a consummate sensorial discernibleness or an exquisitely sensuous distinguishment … in a word: apperceptiveness.

  • Affective Vibes
    [Richard]: ‘… there is an interconnectedness between all the emotional and passional entities – all emotional and passional entities are connected via a psychic web – a network of invisible vibes and currents. This interconnectedness in action is a powerful force – colloquially called ‘energy’ or ‘energies’ – wherein one entity can either seek power over another entity or seek communion with another entity by affective and/or psychic influence’.ref

    [Richard]: ‘All sentient beings, to a greater or lesser extent, are connected via a psychic web … a network of energies or currents that range from ‘good’ to ‘bad’. Feeling threatened or intimidated can result from the obvious cues – the offering of physical violence and/or verbal violence – or from the less obvious … ‘vibe’ violence (to use a ‘60’s term) and/or psychic violence. Similarly, feeling accepted can occur via the same signals or intimations. Power trips – coercion or manipulation of any kind – whether for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ purposes, are all psychic at root … the psychic currents are the most effective power plays for they are the most insidious (charisma, for example).

  • Actualism Method

    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: Obviously, the physical cause necessitates a physical solution (the extinction of the instinctual ‘being’ itself) and this altruistic ‘self’-sacrifice will not eventuate unless the temporary absence or abeyance of the physically inherited cause (a genetically inherited instinctual animal ‘self’) which created the problem of the human condition is intimately experienced, remembered and activated. This peak experience of one’s potentiality is known as a pure consciousness experience (PCE) and is essential to the process of freeing oneself from one’s fate and attaining to one’s destiny. The first and most important step is to remember a PCE (everybody that I have spoken to at length over the last nineteen years – everybody – has had at least one) and thus start thinking for oneself (although most people cannot initially remember a PCE and may need a lot of prompting to retrieve it from their memory). Then each next step becomes obvious of its own accord in one’s daily life as one goes about one’s normal business in the market place. The pure intent born out of the PCE actively works on eliminating the animal ‘self’ bestowed by blind nature each moment again. http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/default.htm