There are three ways to experience the world: sensations, feelings and thoughts. In the perception process, sensations come first, followed by feelings and then thoughts.
The genetically endowed instinctual passions, and their concomitant feelings, form themselves into an inchoate sense of being a self (I/me) separate from the physical body. Suffering is tied to this self/feelings.
Eradication of self/feelings, and thus suffering, has been accomplished on October 1992 by a man from Australia named Richard; followed by more beginning this year.
And now, in 2010, for the first time, Buddhists at DharmaOverground have begun to consider this new way of life sincerely. To begin with, here is an account from Daniel Ingram (a self-proclaimed Arahat) about the awesomeness of Pure Consciousness Experience compared to any other mode of experience that Humanity has known thus far.
Ok. Wrongbot has already given you the standard reading list, but I’d like to address this specifically.
The zeroth reason you’ve been voted down is that this comes across as spamming. No one likes to see a comment of apparently marginal relevance with lots of links to another website with minimal explanation.
Moving on from that, how will the general LW reader respond when reading the above? Let me more or less summarize the thought processes.
There are three ways to experience the world: sensations, feelings and thoughts. In the perception process, sensations come first, followed by feelings and then thoughts.
How do you define these three things? How do you know that they are everything? What is your experimental evidence?
The genetically endowed instinctual passions, and their concomitant feelings, form themselves into an inchoate sense of being a self (I/me) separate from the physical body. Suffering is tied to this self/feelings.
Ok. So now you’ve made some claim that sounds like the common dualist intuition is somehow due to genetics. That’s plausibly true, but would need evidence. The claim that this form of dualism leads to “suffering” seems to be generic Buddhism.
Eradication of self/feelings, and thus suffering, has been accomplished on October 1992 by a man from Australia named Richard; followed by more beginning this year.
So now a testimonial of personal claims about enlightenment. That’s going to go over real well with the empircists here.
And now, in 2010, for the first time, Buddhists at DharmaOverground have begun to consider this new way of life sincerely. To begin with, here is an account from Daniel Ingram (a self-proclaimed Arahat) about the awesomeness of Pure Consciousness Experience compared to any other mode of experience that Humanity has known thus far.
And now we get more testimonials, an explicit connection to Buddhism, and some undefined terms thrown in for good measure (what does it mean for someone to be “self-proclaimed Arahat”? If one doesn’t know what an Arahat is then this means very little. If one is familiar with the term in Buddhist and Jainist beliefs then one isn’t likely to see much of value in this claim).
At this point, the LWer concludes that this message amounts to religious spam or close to that. Then the LWer gets annoyed that scanning this message took up time from their finite lifespan that could be spent in a way that creates more positive utility (whether reading an interesting scientific paper, thinking about the problem of Friendly AI, napping, or even just watching silly cats on Youtube). And then they express their annoyance by downvoting you.
And then they express their annoyance by downvoting you.
Following which, they use more of their finite lifespan to comment in reply, in the hopes of feeling a momentary elevation of status, plus a lifetime of karma enhancements, that will maybe make up for the previous loss of time. ;-)
Actual Freedom (AF) is not a religious system/cult; I am none too sure how anyone got that impression here as the very front page of the AF website mentions “Non-Spiritual” in bold text.
re: marginal relevance
One of the hallmark of this stage of experience which is being called an Actual Freedom (a permanent Pure Conscious Experience) is that cognitive dissonance (among misery and mayhem) is found (experientially, by those who have had PCEs) to be sourced in the identity/feelings. I’ve noticed quite a few posts regarding irrationality and emotion in LW, and therefore the relevance.
re: minimal explanation
The central thesis is this: misery and mayhem is caused by the identity (the inchoate sense of being an identity separate by the physical body, that each and every one of us thinks/feels oneself to be) that the instinctual passions / feelings form themselves into (emergence). Again, this is verified experientially by being in a PCE firsthand; in a PCE, one’s sense of identity temporarily vanishes along with the feelings. A way to be in this PCE permanently has been discovered, and beginning this year, a handful of people (apart from Richard, that is) have already attained it. Is this enough, or would you like more details?
re: There are three ways to experience the world: sensations, feelings and thoughts
To answer your specific questions: I define these things by personal experience. I did not claim that they are “everything.”—only that they are ways in which one experiences (i.e., consciously perceives) the world. As for “experimental evidence”—there are no experiments needed other than one’s ongoing conscious experience.
re: supposed similarity with Buddhist and other spiritual traditions
This is a tricky territory, but perhaps the following would be sufficient to make a simple point: In “Enlightenment”—or any other religio-spiritual attainments—there are feelings/emotions (often transmogrified into divine feelings of Love/Compassion). No one (other than Richard) has claimed to be free of feeligns, emotions and instinctual passios (not instincts). That is the difference. The “Commonly Raised Objects” page that I linked to further above contains more details.
re: So now a testimonial of personal claims about enlightenment.
No, not enlightement (where feelings are still in existent), but an actual freedom (a permanent Pure Conscious Experience). It is rather interesting that this objection (AF == Enlightenment) is raised even in a forum pertaining to human rationality.
re: That’s going to go over real well with the empircists here.
Since this is not about enlightenemnt at all, I’d appreciate an accurate/unbiased feedback that doesn’t misrepresent AF.
re: Arahat
Arahat is a Buddhist label for those that have attained Enlightenment. BTW, the reference to Buddhists, Daniel, Arahats is only a side remark—particularly the increasing popularity of AF even among the Buddhists; and as such is not part of the central thesis of my post (which is concerned with life without feelings/identity)
re: the LWer concludes that this message amounts to religious spam or close to that.
As I haven’t come across one mentioned here, I’ll ask now: what is the factual basis for such a conclution?
I’m sorry, but from the perspective of someone with no prior knowledge of Actual Freedom, you sound as though you’re saying that there is a magical mental state that fixes every problem that evolution baked into the brain over hundreds of millions of years and that the only people who have ever successfully achieved this mental state in all of human history are the devoted followers of a particular charismatic leader who doesn’t believe in last names.
If you wish to distinguish yourself from people who are promoting cults, you need to not sound like someone promoting a cult.
Would a system to automatically delete comments with a low enough score be supported by the community? So that comments would collapse at −3 and be deleted at, say, −10 or −20. I’m not in favor of the idea, but I’m interested to hear if others would be.
Currently you can choose the threshold for hiding comments: click on “preferences” on the right. I’ve turned mine off, because I like to see all the comments. I’d be open to adding an option for “don’t even show there was a comment here,” but I’d like the comments to be preserved in case someone wants to see them.
Maybe not deleted but simply locked so that no-one can post in them. Should stop any painful soul-draining, ultimately pointless arguements. Of course, if the subject is posted again then it’s definitely spamming, and the mods should delete the repost and ban those responsible,
That’s actually the official policy for sufficiently bad trolls, but the moderator is Eliezer and if he doesn’t notice it he doesn’t notice. Feel free to email him and point this thread out.
There are two issues here. One is whether Actual Freedom’s approach produces the claimed effects and whether those effects actually improve people’s lives, and the other is whether it’s a cult. There’s a minor question of whether Actual Freedom is the only path to get those effects.
I don’t think it sounds all that much like a cult—they aren’t asking for money, they aren’t asking for devotion to a leader, and they’re saying they have a simple method of getting access to an intrinsic ability.
Whether it’s as absolutely true as they say is a harder question, though it might improve quality of life without working all the time. Whether it’s safe is a harder question—it sounds like a sort of self-modification which is would be very hard to reverse.
Whether no other system produces comparable results is unknowable.
[..] there is a magical mental state that fixes every problem that evolution baked into the brain over hundreds of millions of years
Yes, not “every problem” but specifically sorrow and malice (sorrow and malice are both feelings anchored on the sense of identity). The word “sensuosity” should come to one’s mind.
the only people who have ever successfully achieved this mental state in all of human history are the devoted followers of a particular charismatic leader who doesn’t believe in last names.
Unless there is evidence to the contrary, the only people free of the identity’s grip (and the feelings) is Richard and a few others mentioned here.
As for “charismatic leader” and “devoted followers” (phrases pertaining to religio-spiritual systems/cults) - Richard is a fellow human being promulgating his discovery. Think of Actualism as in tourism (not the -ism of philosophy/religion/spirituality).
If you wish to distinguish yourself from people who are promoting cults, you need to not sound like someone promoting a cult.
As this is a straw man (there is no cult here to promote), I’ll pass.
You say that you are not promoting a cult, but for claims such as the ones you are making, I have a very high prior probability that you are. To overcome the strong weighting of my prior probability function and convince me that you are doing anything other than promoting a cult you need to supply strong evidence.
If you were able to identify specific ways in which your organization avoids falling into an affective death spiral, for example, I would be more inclined to take you seriously.
The same would hold if you explained why your group is not a cult in a way more compelling than “but we’re actually right!”
I have a very high prior probability that you are [promoting a cult].
Could this “prior probability’ be your intuition?
Suppose I came to you with a creative idea about a new product; where I detail you on the specific steps and resources needed to create that produt, and you were to respond with “I think you are promoting a cult”, then it stands to reason—does it not—that I ask just what exactly [the factual events/knowledge] made you think of my specific method to be a cult?
To overcome the strong weighting of my prior probability function and convince me that you are doing anything other than promoting a cult you need to supply strong evidence.
Or how about supplying an evidence for your intuition that Actualism is a cult?
If you were able to identify specific ways in which your organization avoids falling into an affective death spiral, for example, I would be more inclined to take you seriously.
I am only referring to the actualism method itself, along with a set of people who are experimenting with the method; there is no organization behind it.
I located the following from the link you gave: “But it’s nothing compared to the death spiral that begins with a charge of positive affect—a thought that feels really good.”
If you haven’t noticed before, the actualism method is about eliminating the identity along with its instinctual passions, feelings and emotions—leaving only sensations/thoughts with their concomitant 24x7 sensuous delight.
A very brief explanation of what I mean by prior probability: I’ve seen people making claims of this general sort about, say, twenty different techniques/philosophies/religions. In each of those twenty cases, the claimant and all other followers of the technique/philosophy/religion in question were together part of a cult.
So, presented only with the claims you have made and based on my past experience with such claims, I perceive that is very likely that you are promoting something cult-like, given the 100% correlation I have observed in the past.
This is not really an intuition: it’s a statement of probability informed by the evidence available to me at this particular point in time. I make no claims about whether or not your group is actually a cult, only that I believe it to be very likely.
I make no claims about whether or not your group is actually a cult, only that I believe it to be very likely.
Ok. Again my response is similar: if a fellow being being is to discover a remarkable way of living completely rid of sorrow/malice, and promulgates his discovery for the benefit of others (much like the sharing of a technological invention, for instance) … and if someone is to call the discoverer, his discovery and a few of those experimenting with his method as a cultic organization, then the burden of proof lies on the shoulder of this someone, does it not?
Here’s a hint: the fact that the AF method is primarily about investigation of one’s own feelings/beliefs and how they cause malice/sorrow in oneself and others should automatically imply that phenomena such as groupthink, affective death spiral, dogmatic identification, belonging-to-a-group and so on are completely unproductive to its very thesis/goal.
if someone is to call the discoverer, his discovery and a few of those experimenting with his method as a cultic organization, then the burden of proof lies on the shoulder of this someone, does it not?
Nope, and cult members ask the exact same question.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You came here to convince people to adopt Actualism (it seems). So, actually convince me. Why should I pay more attention to you and your alleged non-cult than I do to someone else’s alleged non-cult? Arguments based on the teachings of your alleged non-cult are worthlessly circular, because you’re trying to convince me that such claims should have worth in the first place.
You came here to convince people to adopt Actualism (it seems). So, actually convince me.
You’re way off the mark. I am not intending to convince/convert anyone to Actualism; there is no group/belief-system/cult here (outside the human imagination, anyways).
I’m posting about Actualism here in LW (which presumably was never mentioned before) simply in the spirit of sharing information and possibly engaging in mutually-interesting discussion with other fellow freethinkers.
Why should I pay more attention to you and your alleged non-cult than I do to someone else’s alleged non-cult?
As it is your life you are living with—and I am only posting here in the spirit of sharing—then what you do with it is completely up to you.
Arguments based on the teachings of your alleged non-cult are worthlessly circular, because you’re trying to convince me that such claims should have worth in the first place.
I can’t help but think that this is getting as absurd as a 19th century person responding to Darwin’s claims on evolution as follows: *Arguments based on the teachings of your alleged non-cult cult are worthlessly circular, because you’re trying to convince me that such claims should have worth in the first place”
But all is not lost; how do you reconcile your probabilistic non-factual belief on cultic nature of an organization that does not actually exist with what I wrote above (which is copy-pasted below for your convenience)?
Here’s a hint: the fact that the AF method is primarily about investigation of one’s own feelings/beliefs and how they cause malice/sorrow in oneself and others should automatically imply that phenomena such as groupthink, affective death spiral, dogmatic identification, belonging-to-a-group and so on are completely unproductive to its very thesis/goal.
I located this page http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiralThis process creates theories that are believed for their own sake and organizations that exist solely to perpetuate themselves, especially when combined with the social dynamics of groupthink.
It is worth pointing out that an Actual Freedom is not a “theory” let alone something to bolster one’s “beliefs” upon (and let alone forming an identity around it). Richard is the first actually free person; and others who have personally seen him verified (to an extent possible) the absence of affective reactions (followed by carefree interactions, for instance). Richard himself was once diagnosed by a psychiatrist who reported the following conditions (abeit in psychiatric terms):
‘depersonalisation’ (selflessness … the absence of an entity that is called ego and Soul or self and Self).
‘alexithymia’ (the absence of the affective faculty … no emotions, passions or calentures whatsoever).
‘derealisation’ (the condition of having lost one’s grip on reality … the ‘real world’ is nowhere to be found).
‘anhedonia’ (the inability to affectively feel pleasure … no hormonal secretions means hedonism is not possible).
And several other actually free people too have reported similar experiences (total absence of the affective faculty), confirmed by their friends, relatives and daily experiences.
Above all, everyone who experienced a PCE was able to verify it for themselves.
It is indeed possible that Richard and others are deluded, but with the increasing number of people getting actually free, and the increasing ease of living/interactions one can find meanwhile (till the first PCE), it is hard to see how this is a delusion.
That said, personal experiences (such as an Actual Freedom) can ultimately only be verified by one’s own conscious experience, which is an ongoing gaiety/ease in everyday life and interactions marked by lesser and lesser affective biases.
Bringing a psychiatrist in to this is good: you have offered evidence that does not rely on reports of subjective experiences. But it is still weak evidence; there are many other hypotheses that explain the evidence, and several of them are much more probable.
An example of what I consider strong evidence: a person who had their brain imaged by an fMRI while performing some set of relatively simple mental tasks both before and after experiencing a PCE had radically different results.
That would not entirely convince me, but it would certainly make me take your claims much more seriously. If there had been ten such experiments, all ten people who claimed PCEs had similar results, and the experiments had been verifiably performed in a sound way, I would then almost certainly devote significant resources to achieving a PCE.
This not the only evidence I would accept, of course, but that should give you an idea of the type and the strength necessary. And if you can’t provide such evidence, well, alas.
On a related note, further links to the actualfreedom.com.au website will be ignored. I have made an effort to read the material there in hopes of better comprehending your claims, but the process is too painful for me to get very far, and this is part of the reason why I’m not taking you seriously. When someone has made an effort to present a large body of work on a topic but has not made an effort to present said work in a way that is easy for other human beings to read, they are usually not very credible. To be clear, I am referring to the website’s poorly-designed navigation, plethora of spelling and grammatical errors, and the use of the HTML tag.
An example of what I consider strong evidence: a person who had their brain imaged by an fMRI while performing some set of relatively simple mental tasks both before and after experiencing a PCE had radically different results.
That would not entirely convince me, but it would certainly make me take your claims much more seriously. If there had been ten such experiments, all ten people who claimed PCEs had similar results, and the experiments had been verifiably performed in a sound way, I would then almost certainly devote significant resources to achieving a PCE.
There have been some studies on meditation and MRIs that you may be interested in.
I’ve seen a couple of those, and consider them significant evidence that certain meditation techniques are useful. As naivecortex is claiming that PCEs have effects much more dramatic than meditation, I would expect to see MRI data that is correspondingly stronger.
An example of what I consider strong evidence: a person who had their brain imaged by an fMRI while performing some set of relatively simple mental tasks both before and after experiencing a PCE had radically different results.
It is indeed a strong neurological evidence. It is a pity that Richard have denied all requests to take a brain scan for reasons pertaining to personal preference (he was more interested in the experiential/practical inclinations to be happy/harmless). Recent actually free people may have different preferences (Trent—a member of DhO that is actually free—is on record saying that he would be willing to undergo such tests if he is fully told what it is about, and if he appraises it to be safe).
A neurological study still will not give a full picture of a PCE. The scientists have not been able to locate the identity/self anywhere in the brain, let alone detect its absence. Nor do I have any ideas as to the way measuring/detecting the subjective experience of sensuous delight (that is the quality of a PCE). As far as I can tell, the only sort of things to be gleaned from a brain scan is the (significant) presence/absence of feelings/emotions, the sort of things that Richard writes about when he reports his ongoing experience: no wide-eyed staring, no increase in heart-beat, no rapid breathing, no adrenaline-tensed muscle tone, no sweaty palms, no blood draining from the face, no dry mouth, no cortisol-induced heightened awareness.
And if you can’t provide such evidence, well, alas.
Ok. I have no doubt that empirical evidence can dispel the last intellectual excuse to take something new to human experience seriously (which is why I have come to favor the idea of taking a brain scan); however, so far at least, actualists’ primary motivation seems to be either the (memory of a) PCE or a curiosity to experiment with a method to have just more fun in life.
I have made an effort to read the material there in hopes of better comprehending your claims, but the process is too painful for me to get very far, and this is part of the reason why I’m not taking you seriously.
There have been several complains about not only the website, but also the way of its presentation (Richard’s prose-style have lead many to see himself as egoist/prick, for instance). I too have made a rather hasty/brief initial post here, which perhaps added to all sorts of incorrect impressions (religious, cultic). What you said about the website—along with the incorrect impressions from even the freethinkers—further confirms my view that the way the content is presented (along with the inaccessibility of layout) in the AF website is not the ideal. I first took note of this when reading Daniel Ingram’s notes on PCE, which is simple and straight to the point. (Of course, I have nothing to criticize against much of the content of what is said in the AF website).
To be clear, I am referring to the website’s poorly-designed navigation
Harmanjit once wrote a consolidation of essential content from the AF website here which is perhaps useful for an introduction.
Actual freedom is a tried and tested way of being happy and harmless in the world as it actually is … stripped of the veneer of normal reality or Greater Reality which is super-imposed by the psychological and/or psychic entity within the body.
and
Here is an actual freedom from the Human Condition, surpassing Spiritual Enlightenment and any other Altered State Of Consciousness, and challenging all philosophy, psychiatry, metaphysics (including quantum physics with its mystic cosmogony)
and
For a start, one needs to fully acknowledge the biological imperative (the instinctual passions) which are the root cause of all the ills of humankind.
and
The Summum Bonum of all the many and varied disciplines – be it philosophy or psychology, physics or metaphysics, cosmology or sociology, theology or spirituality – has been to sanction the protracted doctrinal assumption that a god, by whatever name, is in charge of the universe.
...nope, sorry. I’m done. Pursuing this is no longer worth my time. My estimated probability that there’s any worth at all to what Richard has to say is now negligibly close to zero.
I am not clear as to what point you were trying to make in relationship to all the quotes above except the last one which, without any context, seems absurd to me in some respects. With respect to the first bold text—“psychic” - what the word refers to is the identity that is tangled in the web of psychic currents, which further refers to the affective vibes (eg: sadness of one person creating a bad vibe among others; “loving atmosphere” and so on).
But as an actual freedom from human condition “is no longer worth your time”—then it makes no sense for both of us to continue this discussion.
You know, it’s pretty obvious that you care about our opinion of your movement, otherwise you wouldn’t be spending so much time and effort trying to convince us. That’s substantial evidence against your claim that it produces a lack of sense of self or attachment. You’re really shooting yourself in the foot.
A neurological study still will not give a full picture of a PCE. The scientists have not been able to locate the identity/self anywhere in the brain, let alone detect its absence
Yes they have, at least in the sense that you are referring to. And they can provoke the suppression of this self with magnetic stimulation.
You on the other hand are completely incapable of suppressing the identity/self. You are tied up in it far more than the average person.
Ha, and where is the evidence for that? Is it too much to ask for evidence in a forum pertaining to human rationality?
[...] to actively seek neurological dysfunction.
Sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding. I should have perhaps written clearly; psychiatry being a field dealing with dysfunctional peoples (i.e., dysfunctional identities involved with feelings) the psychiatrist who diagnosed Richard of course had to label (without choice) his sensuous / non-affective ongoing mode of experience in psychiatric terms (whose normal meaning pertaining to identities-with-feelings do not apply to a person with no identity/feelngs).
Is it too much to ask for evidence in a forum pertaining to human rationality?
Sometimes, yes. It depends on how it is used. And I know you did’t really want me to give an answer to your question. But that’s the point. “Where is your evidence?” is just a bunch of verbal symbols that say very little to do with ‘rationality’. If the meaning and intended function of the phrase is equivalent to “Your mom is a cult!” but translated to the vernacular of a different subculture then it says absolutely nothing about rational beliefs. The vast majority of demands “where is your evidence?” that I have encountered have been blatant bullshit (too much time arguing with MENSAns). Your usage is not that bad. Nevertheless, your implied argument relies on an answer (‘No’) for the rhetorical question, which it does not get.
Sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding. I should have perhaps written clearly; psychiatry being a field dealing with dysfunctional peoples (i.e., dysfunctional identities involved with feelings) the psychiatrist who diagnosed Richard of course had to label (without choice) his sensuous / non-affective ongoing mode of experience in psychiatric terms (whose normal meaning pertaining to identities-with-feelings do not apply to a person with no identity/feelngs).
I do understand the distinction you are making here. Richard still sounds like a total fruitloop but I agree that the labels and diagnoses formalized in the psychiatric tradition can be misleading, particularly when they emphasize superficial symptoms and disorder rather than referring more directly to trends in the underlying neurological state that are causing the observed behaviors or thoughts.
Actual Freedom (AF) is not a religious system/cult; I am none too sure how anyone got that impression here as the very front page of the AF website mentions “Non-Spiritual” in bold text.
Calling something “Non-spiritual” doesn’t make it not a religion. To use one obvious example, there are some evangelical Christians who say that they don’t have a religion and aren’t religious, but have a relationship with Jesus. Simply saying something isn’t religious doesn’t help matters.
To answer your specific questions: I define these things by personal experience. I did not claim that they are “everything.”—only that they are ways in which one experiences (i.e., consciously perceives) the world. As for “experimental evidence”—there are no experiments needed other than one’s ongoing conscious experience.
See that’s not ok. Any LWer would explain to you that the human mind is terrible at introspection. Human cognitive biases and other issues make it almost impossible for humans to judge anything about our own cognitive structures. And to claim that t there are no experiments needed is to essentially adopt an anti-scientific viewpoint. You aren’t going to convince anyone here of much while acting that way.
No, not enlightement (where feelings are still in existent), but an actual freedom (a permanent Pure Conscious Experience). It is rather interesting that this objection (AF == Enlightenment) is raised even in a forum pertaining to human rationality.
Of course it is, because what you are describing sounds nearly identical to classical Eastern claims about enlightenment. As to the difference between “enlightenment” and “actual freedom” I don’t see one. Of course, this might be the sort of thing where defining terms in detail would help, but you’ve explicitly refused to do so.
Please go and read some of the major sequences, and maybe after you’ve done so, if you still feel a need to talk about this, you’ll at least have the background necessary to understand why we consider this to be a waste of our time.
Calling something “Non-spiritual” doesn’t make it not a religion.
And calling something ‘religious’ makes it so? You said “the LWer concludes that this message amounts to religious spam or close to that.” And I responded with a question “what is the factual basis for such a conclusion?”. Don’t you think it would be a much more fruitful discussion if we sticked to the facts instead of intuitions/impressions/guesses/probabilities?
Human cognitive biases and other issues make it almost impossible for humans to judge anything about our own cognitive structures.
Yet what I originally claimed is a rather simple and obvious fact, based on common sense and experience, about bucketing our experience into sensations, thoughts and feelings, and not “judging about our cognitive structures”. There really is nothing to our experience outside sensations, thoughts and feelings.
And to claim that t there are no experiments needed is to essentially adopt an anti-scientific viewpoint.
Indeed there can be no experiments to verify the nature of subjective experience. Experiments can only arrive at the physical correlates (such as nerve pathways), but never at the subjective content itself. In the level of brain, it all comes down to neurons; yet, when we say “I sense …” or “I think …” or “I feel …” we are distinctly referring to sensations, thoughts and feelings.
As to the difference between “enlightenment” and “actual freedom” I don’t see one.
The very passage you are responding to contains this: “not enlightement (where feelings are still in existent)” implying that in an actual freedom, feelings are non-existent. It is beyond me how you failed to see that.
Hi there yourself. I don’t believe I’ve run across your website or mini-movement before. As some of your skeptical correspondents note, there is a very long prior history of people claiming enlightenment, liberation, transcendence of the self, and so forth. So even if one is sympathetic to such possibilities, one may reasonably question the judgment of “Richard” when he says that he thinks he is the first in history to achieve his particular flavor of liberation. This really is a mark against his wisdom. He would be far more plausible if he was saying, what I have was probably achieved by some of the many figures who came before me, and I am simply expressing a potentiality of the human spirit which exists in all times and places, but which may assume a different character according to the state of civilization and other factors.
I will start by comparing him to U.G. Krishnamurti. For those who have heard of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian man who at an early age was picked by the Theosophists as their world-teacher, only to reject the role—this is a different guy. J.K., despite his abandonment of a readymade guru role, did go on to become an “anti-guru guru”, lecturing about the stopping of time, the need to think rather than rely on dead thought, et cetera, ad infinitum. U.G. is by comparison a curious minor figure. He lived quietly and out of the way, though he picked up a few fans by the end, apparently including a few Bollywood professionals.
His schtick, first of all, is about negating the value of most forms of so-called spirituality. They seek a fictitious perpetual happiness and this activity, whether it is about anticipating a happy afterlife or striving in the here and now after a perfectly still mind, is what fills the lives of such people. He did not set up the ordinary, materialistically absorbed, emotionally driven life as a counter-ideal—he might agree with the gurus in their analysis of that existence—but maintained that what they were selling as an alternative was itself not real.
How does “Richard” look from this perspective? Well, he seems to say that many of the forms of higher truth or deeper reality that have been associated with spirituality are phantoms; but he does say that achieving his particular state of purged consciousness is a universalizable formula for almost perpetual peace of mind. So, he gets a plus for being down-to-earth, but a minus for overrating the value of his product.
U.G. had a few other strings to his bow. He criticized scientists and philosophical materialism in terms that might have come from his namesake J.K. - for dogmatism, and for not recognizing the role of their own minds in constructing their dogmas. Also, he did claim his own version of a bodily transfiguration, as many gurus do. In his case he called it a “calamity”, said it was horrible, there’s no way you could want it, and there’s no way to seek it even if you wanted to be like him. Whether he was serious about this, or just trying to put across an idea that is subversive in the Indian context (where there are so many superstitions about sages acquiring superpowers once they achieve philosophical enlightenment as well), I couldn’t say. But if we take him literally, then U.G. also gets marked down for implausibility, though at least he didn’t sell his calamity as a desirable and reproducible phenomenon.
I see also from the website that Richard is an old guy, perhaps in his late sixties. I fear that all we have here is someone who has a bit of conceptual facility when it comes to the relationship between mind, appearance and reality, some wisdom when it comes to the relationship between emotion, belief, and suffering, and who lives far enough from the manias of urban life that he can imagine that his latest intellectual high (which perhaps saw him achieve peace with respect to some metaphysical question or other, that has been bothering him for half a lifetime) really does count as an epochal event in the history of human consciousness, and who only has admirers rather than skeptics around him—no-one who is going to tell him anything different.
What is the value of such a person—to the world, to the readers of this website? Even if no-one here buys the idea that this is some sort of transcendental wisdom—absorbed as we all are in various recondite scientific metaphysical ideas and expectations of a greatly empowered transhuman future—I think we can appreciate that there may be some psychological knowledge worth acquiring from such a person. The question is whether it is anything greater than you would get from, say, flipping through a compilation of remarks by the Dalai Lama. If a person in such a position claims, not just that they have insight into the workings of the mind, but that attaining their insight or duplicating their experience is a pathway to a state of happiness and psychological health greater and more reliable than anything available anywhere else, we should ask whether the private happiness of that person stems from factors like (i) they’re old and have given up on many of the things that both please and torment a younger person, like sexuality, and (ii) they have some special material and social arrangement (like living on a commune with a few devoted friends and admirers who handle many of the practicalities of daily life and liaising with the outside world) which is not readily imitated by the suffering masses!
Hi—I will respond briefly to the various points you raised further below, but first:
What is the value of such a person—to the world, to the readers of this website?
It seems that my post was not written carefully, and led some to mistake it for religious spam. I’ve been visiting LW for a while, and practicing actualism (AF) for more than year. The value of the AF method (not person) personally to me is increased well-being / light-heartedness / carefreeness without having to believe in a God or some other metaphysical concept. I have virtually no belief system; Actualism is an -ism like tour-ism, not the -ism in philosophy. That said, the value to the reader of this forum focused on human rationality is of course a challenge (food for thought) to our widely held perception about feelings/emotions (eg: life without feelings is barren and sterile) and, even more, their relationship to all the sorrow and malice which forms the basis for many scientific endeavours; studies related to stress, for instance.
It is quite simple: in a PCE, one’s sense of identity and feelings temporarily vanish, leaving only sensations and thoughts, thereby paving wave for a magical sensuosity that is engendered by everyday events.
Now onto your specific points:
one may reasonably question the judgment of “Richard” when he says that he thinks he is the first in history to achieve his particular flavor of liberation. This really is a mark against his wisdom. He would be far more plausible if he was saying, what I have was probably achieved by some of the many figures who came before me
The reason he doesn’t say “what I have was probably achieved by others before me” is simply that his experience is different. If you go through his personal history article, he writes about his several-month reading of all peoples experiences before arriving at the conclusion that his experience is unique. And for the rest of us, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand as in an Actual Freedom—feelings are non-existent (everyone who’ve had a PCE confirms this), whereas in any form of spiritual Enlightenment known to us, feelings not only continue to exist but often transmorgify into the divine feelings of Love/Compassion. In the CRO, you will find several discussion related to this titled “Actualism is not new” and “The actualism method is not unique”.
I will start by comparing him to U.G. Krishnamurti. [...] Richard seems to say that many of the forms of higher truth or deeper reality that have been associated with spirituality are phantoms
Yes, phantom as in “something apparently sensed but having no physical reality”. Precisely, what he is saying is that—the states of mind experienced by Enlightened people are fuelled by instinctual passions / feelings, and as such have no basis on the actual/physical world. Even though hormonal/chemical substances are actual, the feelings they give rise to are considered to be non-actual (emergent phenomena would be another way to put it, but with the added factor of ‘imagination’ to it).
Richard does say that achieving his particular state of purged consciousness is a universalizable formula for almost perpetual peace of mind.
Purged of the identity and feelings. In other words, a Pure Consciousness Experience. Those who have not had a PCE, can think it of as a sensuous delight.
As for ‘universalizable formuala’, the method promulgated by Richard and other actually free people is indeed repeatable (verifyable on one’s own) and thus satisfies the scientific method.
You say “Richard gets a minus for overrating the value of his product”. If a PCE results in 24x7 sensuous delight marked by no sorrow/malice (as feelings no longer arise), how could it be anything but enabling perpetual (until the death of the body) peace of mind?
Richard has admirers rather than skeptics around him—no-one who is going to tell him anything different.
Have you read the CRO page? If so, you wouldn’t be making this remark. There were (and still are) far too many objections during the time he promulgated his method (10 years).
Is [what Richard says] anything greater than you would get from, say, flipping through a compilation of remarks by the Dalai Lama
As already mentioned, spiritual attainments ends in a delusion (Love/Compassion) and never uproots the root of sorrow/malice itself. Attained Zen Buddhist, for instance, are known to get sorrowful—spirituality transcends suffering (in a metaphysical realm, perhaps), but never eliminates it.
What Richard is saying is that one can completely (100%) eradicate the root the all misery/mayhem of the world.
Does the private happiness of that person (Richard) stem from factors like [...]
If I may interject—Richard’s happiness does not stem from the factors you mention below. It is a 24x7 sensuous delight (marked by no affective feelings) not dependent on any life situation.
(i) they’re old and have given up on many of the things that both please and torment a younger person, like sexuality, and
Richard, and other actually free people, have not given up on the various physical pleasures/comforts of life. You may want to read his journal entry on sex.
[...] (ii) they have some special material and social arrangement (like living on a commune with a few devoted friends and admirers who handle many of the practicalities of daily life and liaising with the outside world) which is not readily imitated by the suffering masses!
Until recently Richard was living alone. He have had companions; mingles with people … does things that normal human beings do.
I had a closer look at the AF website. The guy’s biography was interesting. He starts out juxtaposing himself as a young conscript in the Vietnam war, facing a Buddhist priest burning himself alive, and feeling that both these sides are wrong. He struggles with the meaning of life, for some years falls into spiritual-savior consciousness, seeking to be or feeling that he is an enlightened teacher. Then he eventually he abandons that too, in favor of “the actual world”. Thus, the ordinary ego-self he used to have was false, but so was the metaphysical no-self of his enlightened stage. Having woken up to reality itself, as he sees it, he starts a website or two, and after more than a decade, he has gathered a very small nucleus of people who also find meaning in the particular theory and practice which he espouses.
I was, however, disturbed by what happened to Daniel Ingram. I found on the web an old email discussion between yourself, Ingram, and Harmanjit Singh. In that discussion, Ingram wrote with a clarity and confidence suggesting that he really knew what he was talking about. But when I see his posts now on Dharma Overground, he sounds very confused. It’s also intriguing that Harmanjit himself has rejected AF since that discussion.
What Richard is saying is that one can completely (100%) eradicate the root the all misery/mayhem of the world.
Well, I would say that is completely (100%) bullshit—as are your references to “24x7 sensuous delight”. You do not achieve that just by getting rid of “malice and sorrow”—unless we are using the word “delight” in some innovative sense that would include, say, having your face torn off by a chimpanzee, to name just one disgusting example that I ran across recently of what can happen to a person in this world. Before and above the suffering that human beings create for each other, and the suffering that human beings create psychologically for themselves, the very condition of embodiment already exposes you to horrendous hazards, which reveal something like AF to be nothing more than a sort of post-anti-metaphysical rational-emotive therapy. It may in fact be possible for purely psychological maneuvers to change the qualitative feel of even the worst pain into merely intense sensation without emotional valence; the burning monk that Richard encountered during his tour of duty in Vietnam is already evidence of this. Then again, those monks train a lifetime in order to acquire the ability for such gestures, and the fact that their bodies are already falling apart due to old age may help some of them over the line.
The other critical observation I would want to make is that the idea of getting rid of negative feelings and having only positive feelings I think is, again, bullshit. The idea that the capacity for suffering is linked to the capacity for happiness is one of the simplest, least welcome, and yet most plausible of the cliches in the Buddhist catechism. I know very well that there are lots of people who think they can have their happiness and their enlightenment at the same time, by just being “unattached” to the happiness that comes to them. And probably a sophisticated aesthete who knows their own mind (has a high degree of luminosity, in the local jargon) and who can anticipate that getting too wrapped up in a particular pleasure will harm them later on, can learn to make judgment calls about the degree and manner of engagement with a particular experience that will be the most pleasurable. That sort of rational hedonism might even be combined with some of the LW methods. But please don’t kid us or yourself that something like AF is the key to frickin’ world utopia. If everyone adopted AF the world would be so much happier? Well, if everyone adopted Nazism the world would be a lot happier, too. Any such homogeneity of outlook and of understanding would have that effect. For a while.
Having woken up to reality itself, as [Richard] sees it, he starts a website or two, and after more than a decade, he has gathered a very small nucleus of people who also find meaning in the particular theory and practice which he espouses.
Two things:
The reality that you speak of is referred to as actuality (the sensory experience, minus the affect) in the AF lingo; where the word ‘reality’ is used to refer to the affective inner reality (the emotive cloud surrounding the actual sensations).
The ‘meaning’ that you speak is found only in a PCE or other lesser forms of experiences (feeling good/carefree/etc). There is no meaning in “theory” (AF is not a theory; it is a repeatable/verifyable condition). And the only meaning of the “method” is to facilitate more and more felicitous experiences leading to PCEs.
Ingram wrote with a clarity and confidence suggesting that he really knew what he was talking about
Indeed he did. I too was (intellectually) aware of the spiritual experience that he was referring to, which is in a word called “acceptance” of things as they are.
But when I see his posts now on Dharma Overground, he sounds very confused.
“very confused”, eh? How on earth can what he wrote so clearly, especially the following extract, sound like an expression of high confusion?
[Daniel] One of the interesting things about arahatship is that is conveys this fantastic clarity about that particular form of unclarity, once one has a proper contrast between it and the PCE, and having gone back and forth probably 100 times in the last 4 months between the two, I think I get the two pretty well at this point, though there may yet be surprises and fine points, and I suspect there are.
Well, I would say that [the possibility of completely eradicating the root of all misery/mayhem of the world] is completely (100%) bullshit—as are your references to “24x7 sensuous delight”. You do not achieve that just by getting rid of “malice and sorrow” -
The word malice and sorrow refers to the feelings, and not unfortunate life situations (such as losing a large portion of one’s financial wealth).
The ‘sensual delight’ I speak of is an inherent quality of PCE—sensuous experience bereft of identity/feelings.
[...] unless we are using the word “delight” in some innovative sense that would include, say, having your face torn off by a chimpanzee, to name just one disgusting example that I ran across recently of what can happen to a person in this world.
Physical pain is not extirpated in an actual freedom; for otherwise one could sit on a hot stove and still not know that one’s bum is on fire. What is extirpated is the affective reaction to this physical pain.
Richard, and other actually free people, have spoken of this delight being uninterrupted even in the presence of physical pain.
AF [is] nothing more than a sort of post-anti-metaphysical rational-emotive therapy.
Yet Rational emotive bevariour theraphy does not eliminate the feelings and identity. Further to the point, here is a gem about REBT from Wikipedia: Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind — a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind — of thought. - which perhaps explains why it doesn’t go that deeper. (Mr LeDoux’s studies shows clearly the feelings come prior to thought; evidenced from the fast neural connections to the amygdala, compared to those to the neo-cortex)
The other critical observation I would want to make is that the idea of getting rid of negative feelings and having only positive feelings I think is, again, bullshit.
I have no idea as to where you got this information from. What the AF method suggests is to increase the moments of felitious feelings, and minimize the ‘good’ (trusting/loving) and ‘bad’ (hateful/fearful) feelings … so as to facilitate a PCE to arise (only in a PCE there are no feelings/identity). Until then—and like Daniel too suggests—the idea is to imitate it in one’s affective sphere.
[...] That sort of rational hedonism might even be combined with some of the LW methods.
Being there no feelings to begin with, the condition of PCE has got nothing to do with hedonism at all.
But please don’t kid us or yourself that something like AF is the key to frickin’ world utopia.
No, not at all. I know perfectly well that I am the only person I can change. Global peace and harmoney (what you call as ‘world utopia’) is of course only possible when each and every one of us uproots the cause of sorrow/malice (i.e., a sufficient number of people get actually free as to stir the motivation in others)
Well, if everyone adopted Nazism the world would be a lot happier, too.
It is beyond me as to what relation you see between the condition of living without sorrow/malice and nazism.
There are three ways to experience the world: sensations, feelings and thoughts. In the perception process, sensations come first, followed by feelings and then thoughts.
The genetically endowed instinctual passions, and their concomitant feelings, form themselves into an inchoate sense of being a self (I/me) separate from the physical body. Suffering is tied to this self/feelings.
Eradication of self/feelings, and thus suffering, has been accomplished on October 1992 by a man from Australia named Richard; followed by more beginning this year.
And now, in 2010, for the first time, Buddhists at DharmaOverground have begun to consider this new way of life sincerely. To begin with, here is an account from Daniel Ingram (a self-proclaimed Arahat) about the awesomeness of Pure Consciousness Experience compared to any other mode of experience that Humanity has known thus far.
PS: Before responding to this thread, it is helpful to review the commonly raised objections.
Ok. Wrongbot has already given you the standard reading list, but I’d like to address this specifically.
The zeroth reason you’ve been voted down is that this comes across as spamming. No one likes to see a comment of apparently marginal relevance with lots of links to another website with minimal explanation.
Moving on from that, how will the general LW reader respond when reading the above? Let me more or less summarize the thought processes.
How do you define these three things? How do you know that they are everything? What is your experimental evidence?
Ok. So now you’ve made some claim that sounds like the common dualist intuition is somehow due to genetics. That’s plausibly true, but would need evidence. The claim that this form of dualism leads to “suffering” seems to be generic Buddhism.
So now a testimonial of personal claims about enlightenment. That’s going to go over real well with the empircists here.
And now we get more testimonials, an explicit connection to Buddhism, and some undefined terms thrown in for good measure (what does it mean for someone to be “self-proclaimed Arahat”? If one doesn’t know what an Arahat is then this means very little. If one is familiar with the term in Buddhist and Jainist beliefs then one isn’t likely to see much of value in this claim).
At this point, the LWer concludes that this message amounts to religious spam or close to that. Then the LWer gets annoyed that scanning this message took up time from their finite lifespan that could be spent in a way that creates more positive utility (whether reading an interesting scientific paper, thinking about the problem of Friendly AI, napping, or even just watching silly cats on Youtube). And then they express their annoyance by downvoting you.
Following which, they use more of their finite lifespan to comment in reply, in the hopes of feeling a momentary elevation of status, plus a lifetime of karma enhancements, that will maybe make up for the previous loss of time. ;-)
(For the record, I upvoted you anyway. ;-) )
Hi there,
Actual Freedom (AF) is not a religious system/cult; I am none too sure how anyone got that impression here as the very front page of the AF website mentions “Non-Spiritual” in bold text.
re: marginal relevance
One of the hallmark of this stage of experience which is being called an Actual Freedom (a permanent Pure Conscious Experience) is that cognitive dissonance (among misery and mayhem) is found (experientially, by those who have had PCEs) to be sourced in the identity/feelings. I’ve noticed quite a few posts regarding irrationality and emotion in LW, and therefore the relevance.
re: minimal explanation
The central thesis is this: misery and mayhem is caused by the identity (the inchoate sense of being an identity separate by the physical body, that each and every one of us thinks/feels oneself to be) that the instinctual passions / feelings form themselves into (emergence). Again, this is verified experientially by being in a PCE firsthand; in a PCE, one’s sense of identity temporarily vanishes along with the feelings. A way to be in this PCE permanently has been discovered, and beginning this year, a handful of people (apart from Richard, that is) have already attained it. Is this enough, or would you like more details?
re: There are three ways to experience the world: sensations, feelings and thoughts
To answer your specific questions: I define these things by personal experience. I did not claim that they are “everything.”—only that they are ways in which one experiences (i.e., consciously perceives) the world. As for “experimental evidence”—there are no experiments needed other than one’s ongoing conscious experience.
re: supposed similarity with Buddhist and other spiritual traditions
This is a tricky territory, but perhaps the following would be sufficient to make a simple point: In “Enlightenment”—or any other religio-spiritual attainments—there are feelings/emotions (often transmogrified into divine feelings of Love/Compassion). No one (other than Richard) has claimed to be free of feeligns, emotions and instinctual passios (not instincts). That is the difference. The “Commonly Raised Objects” page that I linked to further above contains more details.
re: So now a testimonial of personal claims about enlightenment.
No, not enlightement (where feelings are still in existent), but an actual freedom (a permanent Pure Conscious Experience). It is rather interesting that this objection (AF == Enlightenment) is raised even in a forum pertaining to human rationality.
re: That’s going to go over real well with the empircists here.
Since this is not about enlightenemnt at all, I’d appreciate an accurate/unbiased feedback that doesn’t misrepresent AF.
re: Arahat
Arahat is a Buddhist label for those that have attained Enlightenment. BTW, the reference to Buddhists, Daniel, Arahats is only a side remark—particularly the increasing popularity of AF even among the Buddhists; and as such is not part of the central thesis of my post (which is concerned with life without feelings/identity)
re: the LWer concludes that this message amounts to religious spam or close to that.
As I haven’t come across one mentioned here, I’ll ask now: what is the factual basis for such a conclution?
I’m sorry, but from the perspective of someone with no prior knowledge of Actual Freedom, you sound as though you’re saying that there is a magical mental state that fixes every problem that evolution baked into the brain over hundreds of millions of years and that the only people who have ever successfully achieved this mental state in all of human history are the devoted followers of a particular charismatic leader who doesn’t believe in last names.
If you wish to distinguish yourself from people who are promoting cults, you need to not sound like someone promoting a cult.
Please don’t feed the trolls!
Seconded. Times like this I wish moderators would delete obviously bad threads; downvoting the original comment into oblivion doesn’t seem enough.
Would a system to automatically delete comments with a low enough score be supported by the community? So that comments would collapse at −3 and be deleted at, say, −10 or −20. I’m not in favor of the idea, but I’m interested to hear if others would be.
Currently you can choose the threshold for hiding comments: click on “preferences” on the right. I’ve turned mine off, because I like to see all the comments. I’d be open to adding an option for “don’t even show there was a comment here,” but I’d like the comments to be preserved in case someone wants to see them.
Maybe not deleted but simply locked so that no-one can post in them. Should stop any painful soul-draining, ultimately pointless arguements. Of course, if the subject is posted again then it’s definitely spamming, and the mods should delete the repost and ban those responsible,
I’d support deleting heavily downvoted comments that do not have upvoted descendants.
That’s actually the official policy for sufficiently bad trolls, but the moderator is Eliezer and if he doesn’t notice it he doesn’t notice. Feel free to email him and point this thread out.
There are two issues here. One is whether Actual Freedom’s approach produces the claimed effects and whether those effects actually improve people’s lives, and the other is whether it’s a cult. There’s a minor question of whether Actual Freedom is the only path to get those effects.
I don’t think it sounds all that much like a cult—they aren’t asking for money, they aren’t asking for devotion to a leader, and they’re saying they have a simple method of getting access to an intrinsic ability.
Whether it’s as absolutely true as they say is a harder question, though it might improve quality of life without working all the time. Whether it’s safe is a harder question—it sounds like a sort of self-modification which is would be very hard to reverse.
Whether no other system produces comparable results is unknowable.
Yes, not “every problem” but specifically sorrow and malice (sorrow and malice are both feelings anchored on the sense of identity). The word “sensuosity” should come to one’s mind.
Unless there is evidence to the contrary, the only people free of the identity’s grip (and the feelings) is Richard and a few others mentioned here.
As for “charismatic leader” and “devoted followers” (phrases pertaining to religio-spiritual systems/cults) - Richard is a fellow human being promulgating his discovery. Think of Actualism as in tourism (not the -ism of philosophy/religion/spirituality).
As this is a straw man (there is no cult here to promote), I’ll pass.
You say that you are not promoting a cult, but for claims such as the ones you are making, I have a very high prior probability that you are. To overcome the strong weighting of my prior probability function and convince me that you are doing anything other than promoting a cult you need to supply strong evidence.
If you were able to identify specific ways in which your organization avoids falling into an affective death spiral, for example, I would be more inclined to take you seriously.
The same would hold if you explained why your group is not a cult in a way more compelling than “but we’re actually right!”
Could this “prior probability’ be your intuition?
Suppose I came to you with a creative idea about a new product; where I detail you on the specific steps and resources needed to create that produt, and you were to respond with “I think you are promoting a cult”, then it stands to reason—does it not—that I ask just what exactly [the factual events/knowledge] made you think of my specific method to be a cult?
Or how about supplying an evidence for your intuition that Actualism is a cult?
I am only referring to the actualism method itself, along with a set of people who are experimenting with the method; there is no organization behind it.
I located the following from the link you gave: “But it’s nothing compared to the death spiral that begins with a charge of positive affect—a thought that feels really good.”
If you haven’t noticed before, the actualism method is about eliminating the identity along with its instinctual passions, feelings and emotions—leaving only sensations/thoughts with their concomitant 24x7 sensuous delight.
A very brief explanation of what I mean by prior probability: I’ve seen people making claims of this general sort about, say, twenty different techniques/philosophies/religions. In each of those twenty cases, the claimant and all other followers of the technique/philosophy/religion in question were together part of a cult.
So, presented only with the claims you have made and based on my past experience with such claims, I perceive that is very likely that you are promoting something cult-like, given the 100% correlation I have observed in the past.
This is not really an intuition: it’s a statement of probability informed by the evidence available to me at this particular point in time. I make no claims about whether or not your group is actually a cult, only that I believe it to be very likely.
Ok. Again my response is similar: if a fellow being being is to discover a remarkable way of living completely rid of sorrow/malice, and promulgates his discovery for the benefit of others (much like the sharing of a technological invention, for instance) … and if someone is to call the discoverer, his discovery and a few of those experimenting with his method as a cultic organization, then the burden of proof lies on the shoulder of this someone, does it not?
Here’s a hint: the fact that the AF method is primarily about investigation of one’s own feelings/beliefs and how they cause malice/sorrow in oneself and others should automatically imply that phenomena such as groupthink, affective death spiral, dogmatic identification, belonging-to-a-group and so on are completely unproductive to its very thesis/goal.
If this is not helpful, perhaps you could glean further details from the Frequently Flogged Misconception page.
Nope, and cult members ask the exact same question.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You came here to convince people to adopt Actualism (it seems). So, actually convince me. Why should I pay more attention to you and your alleged non-cult than I do to someone else’s alleged non-cult? Arguments based on the teachings of your alleged non-cult are worthlessly circular, because you’re trying to convince me that such claims should have worth in the first place.
You’re way off the mark. I am not intending to convince/convert anyone to Actualism; there is no group/belief-system/cult here (outside the human imagination, anyways).
I’m posting about Actualism here in LW (which presumably was never mentioned before) simply in the spirit of sharing information and possibly engaging in mutually-interesting discussion with other fellow freethinkers.
As it is your life you are living with—and I am only posting here in the spirit of sharing—then what you do with it is completely up to you.
I can’t help but think that this is getting as absurd as a 19th century person responding to Darwin’s claims on evolution as follows: *Arguments based on the teachings of your alleged non-cult cult are worthlessly circular, because you’re trying to convince me that such claims should have worth in the first place”
But all is not lost; how do you reconcile your probabilistic non-factual belief on cultic nature of an organization that does not actually exist with what I wrote above (which is copy-pasted below for your convenience)?
I located this page http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral This process creates theories that are believed for their own sake and organizations that exist solely to perpetuate themselves, especially when combined with the social dynamics of groupthink.
It is worth pointing out that an Actual Freedom is not a “theory” let alone something to bolster one’s “beliefs” upon (and let alone forming an identity around it). Richard is the first actually free person; and others who have personally seen him verified (to an extent possible) the absence of affective reactions (followed by carefree interactions, for instance). Richard himself was once diagnosed by a psychiatrist who reported the following conditions (abeit in psychiatric terms):
‘depersonalisation’ (selflessness … the absence of an entity that is called ego and Soul or self and Self).
‘alexithymia’ (the absence of the affective faculty … no emotions, passions or calentures whatsoever).
‘derealisation’ (the condition of having lost one’s grip on reality … the ‘real world’ is nowhere to be found).
‘anhedonia’ (the inability to affectively feel pleasure … no hormonal secretions means hedonism is not possible).
And several other actually free people too have reported similar experiences (total absence of the affective faculty), confirmed by their friends, relatives and daily experiences.
Above all, everyone who experienced a PCE was able to verify it for themselves.
It is indeed possible that Richard and others are deluded, but with the increasing number of people getting actually free, and the increasing ease of living/interactions one can find meanwhile (till the first PCE), it is hard to see how this is a delusion.
That said, personal experiences (such as an Actual Freedom) can ultimately only be verified by one’s own conscious experience, which is an ongoing gaiety/ease in everyday life and interactions marked by lesser and lesser affective biases.
Bringing a psychiatrist in to this is good: you have offered evidence that does not rely on reports of subjective experiences. But it is still weak evidence; there are many other hypotheses that explain the evidence, and several of them are much more probable.
An example of what I consider strong evidence: a person who had their brain imaged by an fMRI while performing some set of relatively simple mental tasks both before and after experiencing a PCE had radically different results.
That would not entirely convince me, but it would certainly make me take your claims much more seriously. If there had been ten such experiments, all ten people who claimed PCEs had similar results, and the experiments had been verifiably performed in a sound way, I would then almost certainly devote significant resources to achieving a PCE.
This not the only evidence I would accept, of course, but that should give you an idea of the type and the strength necessary. And if you can’t provide such evidence, well, alas.
On a related note, further links to the actualfreedom.com.au website will be ignored. I have made an effort to read the material there in hopes of better comprehending your claims, but the process is too painful for me to get very far, and this is part of the reason why I’m not taking you seriously. When someone has made an effort to present a large body of work on a topic but has not made an effort to present said work in a way that is easy for other human beings to read, they are usually not very credible. To be clear, I am referring to the website’s poorly-designed navigation, plethora of spelling and grammatical errors, and the use of the HTML tag.
There have been some studies on meditation and MRIs that you may be interested in.
I’ve seen a couple of those, and consider them significant evidence that certain meditation techniques are useful. As naivecortex is claiming that PCEs have effects much more dramatic than meditation, I would expect to see MRI data that is correspondingly stronger.
It is indeed a strong neurological evidence. It is a pity that Richard have denied all requests to take a brain scan for reasons pertaining to personal preference (he was more interested in the experiential/practical inclinations to be happy/harmless). Recent actually free people may have different preferences (Trent—a member of DhO that is actually free—is on record saying that he would be willing to undergo such tests if he is fully told what it is about, and if he appraises it to be safe).
A neurological study still will not give a full picture of a PCE. The scientists have not been able to locate the identity/self anywhere in the brain, let alone detect its absence. Nor do I have any ideas as to the way measuring/detecting the subjective experience of sensuous delight (that is the quality of a PCE). As far as I can tell, the only sort of things to be gleaned from a brain scan is the (significant) presence/absence of feelings/emotions, the sort of things that Richard writes about when he reports his ongoing experience: no wide-eyed staring, no increase in heart-beat, no rapid breathing, no adrenaline-tensed muscle tone, no sweaty palms, no blood draining from the face, no dry mouth, no cortisol-induced heightened awareness.
Ok. I have no doubt that empirical evidence can dispel the last intellectual excuse to take something new to human experience seriously (which is why I have come to favor the idea of taking a brain scan); however, so far at least, actualists’ primary motivation seems to be either the (memory of a) PCE or a curiosity to experiment with a method to have just more fun in life.
There have been several complains about not only the website, but also the way of its presentation (Richard’s prose-style have lead many to see himself as egoist/prick, for instance). I too have made a rather hasty/brief initial post here, which perhaps added to all sorts of incorrect impressions (religious, cultic). What you said about the website—along with the incorrect impressions from even the freethinkers—further confirms my view that the way the content is presented (along with the inaccessibility of layout) in the AF website is not the ideal. I first took note of this when reading Daniel Ingram’s notes on PCE, which is simple and straight to the point. (Of course, I have nothing to criticize against much of the content of what is said in the AF website).
Harmanjit once wrote a consolidation of essential content from the AF website here which is perhaps useful for an introduction.
Let’s see...
and
and
and
...nope, sorry. I’m done. Pursuing this is no longer worth my time. My estimated probability that there’s any worth at all to what Richard has to say is now negligibly close to zero.
I am not clear as to what point you were trying to make in relationship to all the quotes above except the last one which, without any context, seems absurd to me in some respects. With respect to the first bold text—“psychic” - what the word refers to is the identity that is tangled in the web of psychic currents, which further refers to the affective vibes (eg: sadness of one person creating a bad vibe among others; “loving atmosphere” and so on).
But as an actual freedom from human condition “is no longer worth your time”—then it makes no sense for both of us to continue this discussion.
You know, it’s pretty obvious that you care about our opinion of your movement, otherwise you wouldn’t be spending so much time and effort trying to convince us. That’s substantial evidence against your claim that it produces a lack of sense of self or attachment. You’re really shooting yourself in the foot.
Yes they have, at least in the sense that you are referring to. And they can provoke the suppression of this self with magnetic stimulation.
You on the other hand are completely incapable of suppressing the identity/self. You are tied up in it far more than the average person.
Wow… a cult formed to actively seek neurological dysfunction.
Ha, and where is the evidence for that? Is it too much to ask for evidence in a forum pertaining to human rationality?
Sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding. I should have perhaps written clearly; psychiatry being a field dealing with dysfunctional peoples (i.e., dysfunctional identities involved with feelings) the psychiatrist who diagnosed Richard of course had to label (without choice) his sensuous / non-affective ongoing mode of experience in psychiatric terms (whose normal meaning pertaining to identities-with-feelings do not apply to a person with no identity/feelngs).
here
Sometimes, yes. It depends on how it is used. And I know you did’t really want me to give an answer to your question. But that’s the point. “Where is your evidence?” is just a bunch of verbal symbols that say very little to do with ‘rationality’. If the meaning and intended function of the phrase is equivalent to “Your mom is a cult!” but translated to the vernacular of a different subculture then it says absolutely nothing about rational beliefs. The vast majority of demands “where is your evidence?” that I have encountered have been blatant bullshit (too much time arguing with MENSAns). Your usage is not that bad. Nevertheless, your implied argument relies on an answer (‘No’) for the rhetorical question, which it does not get.
I do understand the distinction you are making here. Richard still sounds like a total fruitloop but I agree that the labels and diagnoses formalized in the psychiatric tradition can be misleading, particularly when they emphasize superficial symptoms and disorder rather than referring more directly to trends in the underlying neurological state that are causing the observed behaviors or thoughts.
That Straw Man must feel seriously misunderstood and abused sometimes!
Calling something “Non-spiritual” doesn’t make it not a religion. To use one obvious example, there are some evangelical Christians who say that they don’t have a religion and aren’t religious, but have a relationship with Jesus. Simply saying something isn’t religious doesn’t help matters.
See that’s not ok. Any LWer would explain to you that the human mind is terrible at introspection. Human cognitive biases and other issues make it almost impossible for humans to judge anything about our own cognitive structures. And to claim that t there are no experiments needed is to essentially adopt an anti-scientific viewpoint. You aren’t going to convince anyone here of much while acting that way.
Of course it is, because what you are describing sounds nearly identical to classical Eastern claims about enlightenment. As to the difference between “enlightenment” and “actual freedom” I don’t see one. Of course, this might be the sort of thing where defining terms in detail would help, but you’ve explicitly refused to do so.
Please go and read some of the major sequences, and maybe after you’ve done so, if you still feel a need to talk about this, you’ll at least have the background necessary to understand why we consider this to be a waste of our time.
I would be greatly edified if you would heed Blueberry’s plea.
And calling something ‘religious’ makes it so? You said “the LWer concludes that this message amounts to religious spam or close to that.” And I responded with a question “what is the factual basis for such a conclusion?”. Don’t you think it would be a much more fruitful discussion if we sticked to the facts instead of intuitions/impressions/guesses/probabilities?
Yet what I originally claimed is a rather simple and obvious fact, based on common sense and experience, about bucketing our experience into sensations, thoughts and feelings, and not “judging about our cognitive structures”. There really is nothing to our experience outside sensations, thoughts and feelings.
Indeed there can be no experiments to verify the nature of subjective experience. Experiments can only arrive at the physical correlates (such as nerve pathways), but never at the subjective content itself. In the level of brain, it all comes down to neurons; yet, when we say “I sense …” or “I think …” or “I feel …” we are distinctly referring to sensations, thoughts and feelings.
The very passage you are responding to contains this: “not enlightement (where feelings are still in existent)” implying that in an actual freedom, feelings are non-existent. It is beyond me how you failed to see that.
Hi there yourself. I don’t believe I’ve run across your website or mini-movement before. As some of your skeptical correspondents note, there is a very long prior history of people claiming enlightenment, liberation, transcendence of the self, and so forth. So even if one is sympathetic to such possibilities, one may reasonably question the judgment of “Richard” when he says that he thinks he is the first in history to achieve his particular flavor of liberation. This really is a mark against his wisdom. He would be far more plausible if he was saying, what I have was probably achieved by some of the many figures who came before me, and I am simply expressing a potentiality of the human spirit which exists in all times and places, but which may assume a different character according to the state of civilization and other factors.
I will start by comparing him to U.G. Krishnamurti. For those who have heard of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian man who at an early age was picked by the Theosophists as their world-teacher, only to reject the role—this is a different guy. J.K., despite his abandonment of a readymade guru role, did go on to become an “anti-guru guru”, lecturing about the stopping of time, the need to think rather than rely on dead thought, et cetera, ad infinitum. U.G. is by comparison a curious minor figure. He lived quietly and out of the way, though he picked up a few fans by the end, apparently including a few Bollywood professionals.
His schtick, first of all, is about negating the value of most forms of so-called spirituality. They seek a fictitious perpetual happiness and this activity, whether it is about anticipating a happy afterlife or striving in the here and now after a perfectly still mind, is what fills the lives of such people. He did not set up the ordinary, materialistically absorbed, emotionally driven life as a counter-ideal—he might agree with the gurus in their analysis of that existence—but maintained that what they were selling as an alternative was itself not real.
How does “Richard” look from this perspective? Well, he seems to say that many of the forms of higher truth or deeper reality that have been associated with spirituality are phantoms; but he does say that achieving his particular state of purged consciousness is a universalizable formula for almost perpetual peace of mind. So, he gets a plus for being down-to-earth, but a minus for overrating the value of his product.
U.G. had a few other strings to his bow. He criticized scientists and philosophical materialism in terms that might have come from his namesake J.K. - for dogmatism, and for not recognizing the role of their own minds in constructing their dogmas. Also, he did claim his own version of a bodily transfiguration, as many gurus do. In his case he called it a “calamity”, said it was horrible, there’s no way you could want it, and there’s no way to seek it even if you wanted to be like him. Whether he was serious about this, or just trying to put across an idea that is subversive in the Indian context (where there are so many superstitions about sages acquiring superpowers once they achieve philosophical enlightenment as well), I couldn’t say. But if we take him literally, then U.G. also gets marked down for implausibility, though at least he didn’t sell his calamity as a desirable and reproducible phenomenon.
I see also from the website that Richard is an old guy, perhaps in his late sixties. I fear that all we have here is someone who has a bit of conceptual facility when it comes to the relationship between mind, appearance and reality, some wisdom when it comes to the relationship between emotion, belief, and suffering, and who lives far enough from the manias of urban life that he can imagine that his latest intellectual high (which perhaps saw him achieve peace with respect to some metaphysical question or other, that has been bothering him for half a lifetime) really does count as an epochal event in the history of human consciousness, and who only has admirers rather than skeptics around him—no-one who is going to tell him anything different.
What is the value of such a person—to the world, to the readers of this website? Even if no-one here buys the idea that this is some sort of transcendental wisdom—absorbed as we all are in various recondite scientific metaphysical ideas and expectations of a greatly empowered transhuman future—I think we can appreciate that there may be some psychological knowledge worth acquiring from such a person. The question is whether it is anything greater than you would get from, say, flipping through a compilation of remarks by the Dalai Lama. If a person in such a position claims, not just that they have insight into the workings of the mind, but that attaining their insight or duplicating their experience is a pathway to a state of happiness and psychological health greater and more reliable than anything available anywhere else, we should ask whether the private happiness of that person stems from factors like (i) they’re old and have given up on many of the things that both please and torment a younger person, like sexuality, and (ii) they have some special material and social arrangement (like living on a commune with a few devoted friends and admirers who handle many of the practicalities of daily life and liaising with the outside world) which is not readily imitated by the suffering masses!
I would be greatly edified if you would heed Blueberry’s plea.
Which plea is that?
Please don’t feed the trolls!
Whether or not his comments are desirable, this poster does not seem to qualify as a troll.
Do not feed the Unwelcome Spammer perhaps?
Just an FYI, but modern technology now allows instant access to a stream of such remarks. The Dalai Lama is on Facebook.
Hi—I will respond briefly to the various points you raised further below, but first:
It seems that my post was not written carefully, and led some to mistake it for religious spam. I’ve been visiting LW for a while, and practicing actualism (AF) for more than year. The value of the AF method (not person) personally to me is increased well-being / light-heartedness / carefreeness without having to believe in a God or some other metaphysical concept. I have virtually no belief system; Actualism is an -ism like tour-ism, not the -ism in philosophy. That said, the value to the reader of this forum focused on human rationality is of course a challenge (food for thought) to our widely held perception about feelings/emotions (eg: life without feelings is barren and sterile) and, even more, their relationship to all the sorrow and malice which forms the basis for many scientific endeavours; studies related to stress, for instance.
It is quite simple: in a PCE, one’s sense of identity and feelings temporarily vanish, leaving only sensations and thoughts, thereby paving wave for a magical sensuosity that is engendered by everyday events.
Now onto your specific points:
The reason he doesn’t say “what I have was probably achieved by others before me” is simply that his experience is different. If you go through his personal history article, he writes about his several-month reading of all peoples experiences before arriving at the conclusion that his experience is unique. And for the rest of us, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand as in an Actual Freedom—feelings are non-existent (everyone who’ve had a PCE confirms this), whereas in any form of spiritual Enlightenment known to us, feelings not only continue to exist but often transmorgify into the divine feelings of Love/Compassion. In the CRO, you will find several discussion related to this titled “Actualism is not new” and “The actualism method is not unique”.
Yes, phantom as in “something apparently sensed but having no physical reality”. Precisely, what he is saying is that—the states of mind experienced by Enlightened people are fuelled by instinctual passions / feelings, and as such have no basis on the actual/physical world. Even though hormonal/chemical substances are actual, the feelings they give rise to are considered to be non-actual (emergent phenomena would be another way to put it, but with the added factor of ‘imagination’ to it).
Purged of the identity and feelings. In other words, a Pure Consciousness Experience. Those who have not had a PCE, can think it of as a sensuous delight.
As for ‘universalizable formuala’, the method promulgated by Richard and other actually free people is indeed repeatable (verifyable on one’s own) and thus satisfies the scientific method.
You say “Richard gets a minus for overrating the value of his product”. If a PCE results in 24x7 sensuous delight marked by no sorrow/malice (as feelings no longer arise), how could it be anything but enabling perpetual (until the death of the body) peace of mind?
Have you read the CRO page? If so, you wouldn’t be making this remark. There were (and still are) far too many objections during the time he promulgated his method (10 years).
As already mentioned, spiritual attainments ends in a delusion (Love/Compassion) and never uproots the root of sorrow/malice itself. Attained Zen Buddhist, for instance, are known to get sorrowful—spirituality transcends suffering (in a metaphysical realm, perhaps), but never eliminates it.
What Richard is saying is that one can completely (100%) eradicate the root the all misery/mayhem of the world.
If I may interject—Richard’s happiness does not stem from the factors you mention below. It is a 24x7 sensuous delight (marked by no affective feelings) not dependent on any life situation.
Richard, and other actually free people, have not given up on the various physical pleasures/comforts of life. You may want to read his journal entry on sex.
Until recently Richard was living alone. He have had companions; mingles with people … does things that normal human beings do.
If you’re interested, may I suggest two articles: 180 Degress Opposite briefly mentions the various differences from spirituality, and Attentiveness and Sensuousnesds and Appercetiveness describes the quality of the condition of PCE/AF.
I had a closer look at the AF website. The guy’s biography was interesting. He starts out juxtaposing himself as a young conscript in the Vietnam war, facing a Buddhist priest burning himself alive, and feeling that both these sides are wrong. He struggles with the meaning of life, for some years falls into spiritual-savior consciousness, seeking to be or feeling that he is an enlightened teacher. Then he eventually he abandons that too, in favor of “the actual world”. Thus, the ordinary ego-self he used to have was false, but so was the metaphysical no-self of his enlightened stage. Having woken up to reality itself, as he sees it, he starts a website or two, and after more than a decade, he has gathered a very small nucleus of people who also find meaning in the particular theory and practice which he espouses.
I was, however, disturbed by what happened to Daniel Ingram. I found on the web an old email discussion between yourself, Ingram, and Harmanjit Singh. In that discussion, Ingram wrote with a clarity and confidence suggesting that he really knew what he was talking about. But when I see his posts now on Dharma Overground, he sounds very confused. It’s also intriguing that Harmanjit himself has rejected AF since that discussion.
Well, I would say that is completely (100%) bullshit—as are your references to “24x7 sensuous delight”. You do not achieve that just by getting rid of “malice and sorrow”—unless we are using the word “delight” in some innovative sense that would include, say, having your face torn off by a chimpanzee, to name just one disgusting example that I ran across recently of what can happen to a person in this world. Before and above the suffering that human beings create for each other, and the suffering that human beings create psychologically for themselves, the very condition of embodiment already exposes you to horrendous hazards, which reveal something like AF to be nothing more than a sort of post-anti-metaphysical rational-emotive therapy. It may in fact be possible for purely psychological maneuvers to change the qualitative feel of even the worst pain into merely intense sensation without emotional valence; the burning monk that Richard encountered during his tour of duty in Vietnam is already evidence of this. Then again, those monks train a lifetime in order to acquire the ability for such gestures, and the fact that their bodies are already falling apart due to old age may help some of them over the line.
The other critical observation I would want to make is that the idea of getting rid of negative feelings and having only positive feelings I think is, again, bullshit. The idea that the capacity for suffering is linked to the capacity for happiness is one of the simplest, least welcome, and yet most plausible of the cliches in the Buddhist catechism. I know very well that there are lots of people who think they can have their happiness and their enlightenment at the same time, by just being “unattached” to the happiness that comes to them. And probably a sophisticated aesthete who knows their own mind (has a high degree of luminosity, in the local jargon) and who can anticipate that getting too wrapped up in a particular pleasure will harm them later on, can learn to make judgment calls about the degree and manner of engagement with a particular experience that will be the most pleasurable. That sort of rational hedonism might even be combined with some of the LW methods. But please don’t kid us or yourself that something like AF is the key to frickin’ world utopia. If everyone adopted AF the world would be so much happier? Well, if everyone adopted Nazism the world would be a lot happier, too. Any such homogeneity of outlook and of understanding would have that effect. For a while.
Two things:
The reality that you speak of is referred to as actuality (the sensory experience, minus the affect) in the AF lingo; where the word ‘reality’ is used to refer to the affective inner reality (the emotive cloud surrounding the actual sensations).
The ‘meaning’ that you speak is found only in a PCE or other lesser forms of experiences (feeling good/carefree/etc). There is no meaning in “theory” (AF is not a theory; it is a repeatable/verifyable condition). And the only meaning of the “method” is to facilitate more and more felicitous experiences leading to PCEs.
Indeed he did. I too was (intellectually) aware of the spiritual experience that he was referring to, which is in a word called “acceptance” of things as they are.
“very confused”, eh? How on earth can what he wrote so clearly, especially the following extract, sound like an expression of high confusion?
[Daniel] One of the interesting things about arahatship is that is conveys this fantastic clarity about that particular form of unclarity, once one has a proper contrast between it and the PCE, and having gone back and forth probably 100 times in the last 4 months between the two, I think I get the two pretty well at this point, though there may yet be surprises and fine points, and I suspect there are.
The word malice and sorrow refers to the feelings, and not unfortunate life situations (such as losing a large portion of one’s financial wealth).
The ‘sensual delight’ I speak of is an inherent quality of PCE—sensuous experience bereft of identity/feelings.
Physical pain is not extirpated in an actual freedom; for otherwise one could sit on a hot stove and still not know that one’s bum is on fire. What is extirpated is the affective reaction to this physical pain.
Richard, and other actually free people, have spoken of this delight being uninterrupted even in the presence of physical pain.
Yet Rational emotive bevariour theraphy does not eliminate the feelings and identity. Further to the point, here is a gem about REBT from Wikipedia: Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind — a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind — of thought. - which perhaps explains why it doesn’t go that deeper. (Mr LeDoux’s studies shows clearly the feelings come prior to thought; evidenced from the fast neural connections to the amygdala, compared to those to the neo-cortex)
I have no idea as to where you got this information from. What the AF method suggests is to increase the moments of felitious feelings, and minimize the ‘good’ (trusting/loving) and ‘bad’ (hateful/fearful) feelings … so as to facilitate a PCE to arise (only in a PCE there are no feelings/identity). Until then—and like Daniel too suggests—the idea is to imitate it in one’s affective sphere.
Being there no feelings to begin with, the condition of PCE has got nothing to do with hedonism at all.
No, not at all. I know perfectly well that I am the only person I can change. Global peace and harmoney (what you call as ‘world utopia’) is of course only possible when each and every one of us uproots the cause of sorrow/malice (i.e., a sufficient number of people get actually free as to stir the motivation in others)
It is beyond me as to what relation you see between the condition of living without sorrow/malice and nazism.
I recommend that you read the weird old novel A Voyage to Arcturus and contemplate the figure of Gangnet. And I will say no more.
Welcome to Less Wrong. You may want to take a look at the articles listed on the LessWrong wiki page on religion; they may provide an understanding of why you are being downvoted.
I downvoted it because it looks a lot like spam, not so much because it is specifically religious spam.