October 25 2024

VINEETO: And to leave no doubt about the exact nature of pure intent –

[Richard]: Also, here is a hint for future reading: the word pure, in the phrase pure intent, indicates to a puzzling-it-out-reader that whatever it is which the word intent refers to one thing is for sure: it cannot be affective (else it be not pure). (Richard, List D, Jonathan, 16 February 2014).

JAMES: This quote from Richard posted by Vineeto above about pure intent really stuck with me. Especially this part: “it cannot be affective (else it would not be pure).”
The only thing I know to do to tap in to pure intent is remember the purity of it from my last PCE. So far this is not working. Like Kuba told me I am missing intent. It does make sense that I need to crank up intent to experience pure intent and it cannot be affective. Which begs the question: Can I have intent w/o it being affective?

JAMES: To sum it all up pure intent is the intent to experience the purity.

VINEETO: Hi James,

There are several ways for you to “crank up pure intent”.

For one, you can read and contemplate all of Richard’s descriptions of his various pure consciousness experiences in his selected writings, (Richard, Selected Writing, Pure Consciousness Experiences) to which I recently added those from the tooltips of his Personal Webpage (Richard’s Personal Webpage), where you also find even more descriptions of this kind. When you read them, slowly, with the intention to grasp and experience the flavour conveyed in those descriptions, you can get enticed to want to experience life in this perfect and delightful way as one experiences it in a PCE. The memory of your own PCE will become more vivid and, as I understand you, this is how you want to live for the rest of your life.

[Richard]: Diligent attention paid to the peak experience gives rise to pure intent. With pure intent running as a ‘golden thread’ through one’s life, reflective contemplation rapidly becomes more and more fascinating. When one is totally fascinated, reflective contemplation becomes pure awareness … and then apperception happens of itself. (Richard, List B, No. 11, 22 March 1998).

Your habit of summing up to a singular sentence of what Richard or I am saying is not enough now – it is the minimum approach. You want to understand it not just cognitively but experientially. In order to “crank up pure intent” to reach your destiny – something you have been on and off busy with for at least 25 years – it is now time to expand and extend yourself like never before. Viz.:

[Richard]: I have the greatest admiration for ‘Richard the identity’: He was willing to self-immolate so that I could be here. He never knew me, but was utterly confident that the universe knew what it was doing. He was happy to disappear so that all this could eventuate. He was prepared to go all the way without reservation ... the ‘boots and all’ approach, he called it. What are you saving yourself for? Reach out. Extend yourself. All one gets by waiting is yet more waiting. Patience may be a virtue, but procrastination is an abomination.

Be wary of virtues ... they are designed to perpetuate the self. (Richard, Audio-taped Dialogues, Compassion Perpetuates Sorrow).

Notice the habit to contract or withdraw and nip it in the bud when you notice it. Expand into cognitively and then experientially understanding, contemplating and imitating the actual world which is right under your nose and all around, the exquisiteness and perfection of it. Enjoy it and then appreciate the enjoyment and thus extend and increase the marvelling and appreciating in this moment the very fact of being alive. The sights, the sounds, the sensate experiences, the very fact that the universe exists, that you exist as a flesh-and-blood body, that you are alive this very moment, the only moment you can actually experience.

Instead of contracting, become interested, fascinated and finally obsessed by this one single aim you have in life.

*

As for “Which begs the question: Can I have intent w/o it being affective?” – of course you can! You quoted the answer yourself recently –

James: Finally reread TMOBA after Vineeto’s suggestion and it really does say it all. Here is the last paragraph:

Richard]: “Then there is nothing except the series of sensations which happen … not happening to an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ but just happening … moment by moment … one after another. To live life as these sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and magic. It is all so peaceful, in this actual world; one is living in peace and tranquillity; a meaningful peace and tranquillity. Life is intrinsically purposeful, the reason for existence lies openly all around. It never goes away – nor has it ever been away – it was just that ‘I’/‘me’ was standing in the way of the meaning of life being apparent. The answer to everything that has puzzled humankind for all of human history is readily elucidated when one is actually free.”

“The ‘Mystery of Life’ has been penetrated and laid open for all those with the eyes to see.” (Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive).

As a final guide to how you can experience being alive non-affectively, apperceptively, here is how Richard describes “mind in neutral” –

[Richard]:

• [Co-Respondent]: ‘Are you conscious now?

• [Richard]: ‘Yes.

• [Co-Respondent]: ‘Conscious of what?

• [Richard]: ‘Primarily, of the infinitude this physical universe actually is ... as this flesh and blood body only (sans identity in toto) I am proprioceptively conscious of being just here, right now and, as such, the other somatic perceptions currently in operation – tactile, olfactive, visual, audile – are direct: this skin is savouring the touch, the caress, of the mid-winter [seasonal] ambience; these nostrils are rejoicing in the abundance of aromas and scents drifting fragrantly all about; these retinas are delighting in the profusion of colour and texture and form; these eardrums are revelling in the cadence of tones as their resonance and timbre fills the air.

Further to that this mind, other than the sheer enjoyment and appreciation of being alive as this flesh and blood body, is ambling along in neutral as all the while there is the apperceptive wonder that this marvellous paradise actually exists in all its vast array’. (Richard, Abditorium, Mind in Neutral).

Cheers Vineeto

October 28 2025

KUBA: Hi Vineeto,

VINEETO: It bears well that you now know which direction you want to go.

KUBA: Yes I do indeed and solidly from experience too, over the weekend and today I have been delighting in this mirificent flavour, I am glad that Claudiu got me onto this word but if not I would say it is a magical fairytale like flavour, this sense of endless wonder and amazement – “how can the universe exist, how can all this be so” etc.

VINEETO: Hi Kuba,

Ah, Richard was equally delighted when he found the word and created a long list of definitions and samples of literary use for it (Richard, Abditorium, Delight, #Mirific). It appears in a lot of dictionaries but is rarely used.

KUBA: With the immediate reward being the wonder and amazement itself rather than any intellectual answer. I am amazed each time this flavour is tasted because it is just as wondrous every time. This flavour, what it is and where it leads is the direction I want to go in, and not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. It is what I want to do with my life. And there is a golden clew in place now back to this flavour, and it is so very worth it every time.

Those obstacles are there – to be squarely addressed rather than gingerly walked around – but now there is such a worthy goal, and such a pinpointed attention to it that I am confident it is possible to proceed.

VINEETO: It’s wonderful you now have access to this flavour of “the wonder and amazement itself rather than any intellectual answer”. Intellectual answers are never successful in the long run standing against any onslaught of instinctual passions, whereas “wonder and amazement itself” are very potent and ultimately irresistible.

You and Sonya seem to have infected each other with the joy and fun of considering obstacles “to be squarely addressed rather than gingerly walked around” – it needs a bit of daring at first but once your abandon your pride and acknowledge that ‘you’ are as bad and as mad as the person next door, then the fun of addressing any obstacle to feeling excellent begins, and as I said to Sonya, nothing succeeds like success, “and it is so very worth it every time”.

By the way the terms ‘as bad and as mad’ comes from Peter –

Respondent: What follows below is, I think, Peter, a nice example of your freedom of the need to justify yourself and to identify the character flaws of other people as opposed to your own absence of such flaws.

[‘Peter’ to No 60]: One of the major problems with having pet peeves ... <snipped for length>(see here)

‘Peter’: I have had this criticism levelled at me many a time before but it simply makes no sense at all. I have always been upfront about the fact that ‘I’ was as bad and as mad as any other instinctually-driven being on the planet.

Again from (the very first page) of my Journal –

[‘Peter’]: ‘As I sit on the balcony of our small flat contemplating life, I am moved to start writing my story. The urge has been welling in me over the last few months, so I’m now making a start. There is now ample time, given that I have all but retired, to reflect on the sense I have made of life.

Indeed, that has been the innate drive in my life: to make sense of this mad world that I found myself living in. The insanity of endless wars, conflict, arguments, sadness, despair, failed hopes and dreams seems endemic. *And worse still, as I gradually forced myself to admit, I was as mad, and as bad, as everyone else.* I had tried all of the solutions that Humanity offered in order to be happy, but in the end they made no sense and haven’t worked to sort out the mess.’ [emphasis added] (Peter’s Journal, Foreword).

Acknowledging that I was ‘as mad and as bad as everyone else’ was the starting point of my realizing that I needed to change – that I needed to become free of malice and free of sorrow if I wanted to be harmless and if I wanted to be happy.

Such as simple matter-of-fact acknowledgement, the necessary prerequisite for change to happen, is what is sometimes colloquially known as ‘getting off one’s high horse’. (Peter, Actual Freedom List, No. 89)

KUBA: Oh and the other thing I can see now, the morning resentments and the evening gloom, these feelings were there as a result of me walking down the path which I know cannot deliver the goods. It’s because that flavour would be already gone, and then I would be going through the motions of the ‘real world’, knowing that it leads nowhere. There was always this sense to those feelings like ‘what is the point of all this’ and indeed what is the point of living anything but that which delivers the goods, especially when that thing has already been located.

All of those feelings as well as the “high achiever” who would come in to assuage them, none of this is of any relevance when I am allowing that mirificent flavour. And at the same time nothing at all in the ‘real world’ can make up for what is missing when that flavour is lost.

VINEETO: Ah you recognized what caused “the morning resentments and the evening gloom” – according to Geoffrey’s metaphor “being lost in the woods nearby”. Naturally that also means you were not “spending the day-time in paradise”, they were feelings of a conditional happiness or perhaps good feelings. This paradise was a real-world paradise, not actuality or near-actuality. I can say this with confidence because if you had spent the day in actual “paradise” you would not have experienced “the evening gloom” and “morning resentments” day after day. The meaning you were looking for was not in the day-time “paradise”, those feelings ended when the conditions/ activities causing your happiness ended. As you said yourself – “it’s selling out”.

Now that you found the genuine flavour, the “mirificent flavour” of pure intent, you know what you had been missing.

It is from the ongoing experience of the actual world that Richard says –

Richard: Aye ... when ‘I’ willingly self-immolate – psychologically and psychically – then ‘I’ am making the most noble sacrifice that ‘I’ can make for oneself and all humankind ... for ‘I’ am what ‘I’ hold most dear. It is ‘my’ moment of glory. It is ‘my’ crowning achievement ... it makes ‘my’ petty life all worth while. It is not an event to be missed ... to physically die without having experienced what it is like to become dead is such a waste of a life. In an ecstatic moment of being present, ‘I’ expire. ‘I’ am extirpated, rubbed out. ‘I’ cease to exist, permanently. Something irrevocable takes place and every thing and every body and every event is different, somehow, although the same physically; something immutable occurs and every thing and every body and every event is all-of-a-sudden undeniably actual, in and of itself, as a fact; something irreversible happens and an immaculate perfection and a pristine purity permeates every thing and every body and every event; something has changed forever, although it is as if nothing has happened, except that the entire world is a magical fairytale-like playground full of incredible gladness and a delight which is never-ending. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Mark, 18 May 1999).

Some people objected to his standard of the actual world – perfection –

Respondent: I once stated that I thought that actualism had a ‘dark underbelly’. This was largely due to a host of negative adjectives applied to being ‘normal’. For example, ‘the pits’, ‘abysmal state of affairs’, ‘petty life’, ‘pathetic’, ‘miserable’, ‘bad situation’, and so on. It is obvious to me that most ‘normal’ people don’t see it that way – which is why I thought you to be displaying the ‘dark underbelly’ that I spoke of.

Richard: It is life in the real-world (being normal) which has the dark underbelly – and thus, albeit sublimated and transcended, so too has life in the unreal-world (being abnormal) – not life here in this actual world ... the pristine perfection of the peerless purity the infinitude this universe actually is ensures nothing dirty (‘being’ or ‘presence’) can get in.

Respondent: It is helpful to take this all in context – and the context in this case is ‘compared to an actual freedom from the human condition’. My misunderstanding appears to have been based upon the fact that I didn’t notice the shifted standard.

Richard: There is only one standard (to use your terminology) here in this actual world: perfection.

Respondent: That is, ‘normal’ people usually have quite a different standard of what constitutes a good life than an actualist does. Is this a correct assessment?

Richard: Indeed it is ... an actualist settles for nothing less than the perfection evidenced in a pure consciousness experience (PCE). Hence my report, in the previous e-mail, that I could not deny that all the while I was both normal and abnormal there must be/surely was something better, far better, than either the ‘great life’ or the ‘glorious life’ – and thus I would not, could not, and did not, settle for second best – and that this is precisely what I am conveying to my fellow human beings: whatever you do, do not ever settle for second best.

For the best is just here, right now, where it already has been, all along, and always will be. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 27f, 24 October 2003)

KUBA: It looks like (and I don’t know when exactly) but I already signed the contract, in that I have already seen what is possible, so how could anything but that ever compare. I see now how for ‘Vineeto’ virtual freedom was never an indefinite platform to remain but rather a dynamic stepping stone to the ultimate.

VINEETO: Indeed, although ‘Vineeto’ had a long period when ‘she’ ran away from even contemplating going out from under control (the genuine virtual freedom). It was only ‘her’ determination not to “do a Devika”, and never to give up when the best was so obviously achievable (because of her own PCE and because Richard lived it day after day), that ‘she’ eventually dared, and cared, to stop running and leave ‘her’ fear behind in lieu of near-actual-caring.

KUBA: Of course ‘I’ would look for steeples within the ‘real world’ when that flavour was lost and yet knowing deep down it is pointless. Having experienced pure intent ‘I’ can never fully forget the experience, the wheels are in motion and ‘I’ can either kid ‘myself’ or press on.

So the warning, not to “do a Devika” this is relevant, it looks like at least I had my endless stubbornness that would never allow it.

VINEETO: Yes, “never fully forget the experience” of “wonder and amazement”, tie a golden clew to it each time you experience it.

And don’t castigate yourself for your “endless stubbornness” – more than likely it’s not only the deep fear of venturing into the unknown but also the fear of leaving behind everything which is dear/ familiar to you and common to all. And the moment you dare to look the fear in the eye, acknowledge its existence and refuse to be beaten, fear will instantly lose a large portion of its power (because fearing fear is feeding it) and then you can look for the thrill of the adventure of a lifetime.

It bears well indeed.

Cheers Vineeto