RICHARD: One of the main keys to success is a focus on time itself as a sensate experience. My oft-repeated refrain is this: ‘The first step to being free is the actual understanding that this moment in time is the only place where being alive happen. The past, although it was actual when it did happen, is not actual now. The future, although it will be actual when it does happen, is not actual now. Only now is actual and as it is always now then the purity of innocence is perpetually here already … where time has no duration. Then what one is – as this body being apperceptively aware – is this material universe experiencing itself as a sensate, reflective human being. The physical space of this universe is infinite and its time is eternal … thus the infinitude of this very material universe has no beginning and no ending … and therefore no middle. There are no edges to this universe, which means that there is no centre, either. We are all coming from nowhere and are not going anywhere for there is nowhere to come from nor anywhere to go to. We are nowhere in particular … which means we are anywhere at all’.
To be the consciousness of the infinitude … it is no little thing that one does.
RESPONDENT: By the way, the part of HAIETMOBA? that induced a PCE for me one day were the words ‘this moment’. They grabbed my attention, stopped me and … presto changeo , actuality bloomed.
RICHARD: Yes, I noticed that the first time you wrote it and it particularly caught my attention as I have had more than a few people ask why the question cannot be shortened to ‘how am I experiencing’ … the ‘this moment of being alive’ is vital to being here – just here – right now, at this moment, as this is the only moment of being alive.
In actuality it is, of course, never not this moment – this moment lasts forever, as it always has done and always will do, and is the arena in which all things happen – but in reality it is experienced as being but a fleeting moment as one is out of time.
To be in time is, to use your expression, such a gas!
RICHARD: I would say to myself: ‘This is my only moment of being alive … I am actually here doing this reading of these words now’. The past – although it was actual whilst it was happening – is not happening now … and never will again. A past peak experience can never be repeated … it is useful inasmuch as it bestows the requisite confidence that it is possible to experience the purity of the perfection of life here and now … but that is it, finish. One slips into this moment in time and this place in space by being aware that all this that is happening is happening for the very first time and that I have never been here before doing this. In fact: I have never been here before. In everyday terminology this moment in time is the ‘cutting-edge of reality’. Who knows what will happen next as ‘the future’ does not exist until this moment happens.
If this realisation is not thrilling I would like to know what is!
RICHARD: The actualism method (‘how am I experiencing this moment of being alive’) is a method specifically designed to bring about a direct experience of the actual … the question is asked, each moment again, until it becomes an automatic approach to life or a wordless attitude to living. Initially it will be seen that how one is experiencing this moment is usually via a feeling or a belief (sometimes cunningly disguised as a ‘truth’) – and a belief is an emotion-backed thought anyway – thus effectively blocking the ‘direct sense experience’ . And for as long as one is experiencing this moment through a feeling – no matter how deep or profound the feeling may be – one is cutting oneself off from the splendour of the actual.
See also
- “[..] how to evoke it (as in your ‘Then as I stuck with that seeing that it was this moment of being alive I was pulled towards it. The pull itself was exhilarating and thrilling’ sentences)” https://actualfreedom.com.au/richard/listdcorrespondence/listd44.htm
- Audio-Taped Dialogue: This Moment Has No Duration