Allusions to Actual Freedom existing before Richard

[Kub933]

Yes this critique of actualism - that only a small number have managed to self-immolate and therefore it is not worth one’s time and energy - is silly because there is a lot that can be done in the meantime.

A virtual freedom from sorrow and malice is indeed already way beyond ‘normal’ human expectations. There are things that I now take for granted which people from the real world would likely see as unprobable/impossible.

It seems like virtual freedom ‘went out of fashion’ in recent years . Maybe because Srinath and Geoffrey didn’t take this route. I remember when I was initially posting on this forum one member even described virtual freedom as a foolish pursuit! But it is such a sensible thing to do in the meantime. Why not shorten the distance and have a ball in the meantime. It doesn’t have to be this all or nothing Hail Mary from grim reality to actual freedom.

I always liked Peters suggestion here, that if one cannot contemplate at least a virtual freedom from sorrow and malice then one might as well forget about it all. It’s a nice way that ‘I’ can roll up ‘my’ sleeves and get stuck in immediately, then one’s involvement will be more than just a cerebral exercise. It is how ‘I’ demonstrate ‘my’ commitment to the eventual goal.

[claudiu]

@Kub933

There are things that I now take for granted which people from the real world would likely see as unprobable/impossible.

Yees once in a while I step back and realize how I have essentially no concern whatsoever about life in any grand or overarching sense. I know that whatever may happen, everything will be easy to deal with. No emotion or feeling I manifest myself as in reaction to anything, will lead to some lingering unhappiness. It’s really quite wondrous!

[Felix]

I have some potentially helpful stuff to say but I’d prefer to hear what @Vineeto says about what you describe in terms of your experience @scout.

In the meantime if you had any more information to add like how you ended up with this sort of “condition” (what would you call it - chronic fatigue? burnout? depression?) that might be helpful also.

I.e How long has it been there? Were there traumatic events that precipitated it? What’s your life like now do you have a partner etc.

The good news overall is that I have been through this type of thing and still deal with certain issues of this nature so there might be some helpful crossovers in terms of dealing with these sorts of issues.

Everyone is different and part of being a pioneer of actualism is taking up the challenge of becoming free of the human condition as the only one who you can do it for. The fact that you are able to describe your experiences openly and honestly is a great start as knowing where you are at is key.

[Vineeto]

Vineeto: Are you saying that the moment you become aware how you experience yourself, the fact of being aware makes the experience “painful and exhausting”? Or has it been like that all along, and you were refusing to/afraid to acknowledge it?

Scout: The latter, but lending it attention makes the pain feel more acute than numbing it (even though I remain low-grade agitated while numbing too). I’ve been trying to work on not fighting it, it’s just hard bc if I don’t it feels kind of overwhelming.

Hi Scout,

I understand that it is hard to get an entry into the actualism method when you have a long-habituated response to fear and pain and all other unpleasant feelings. The thing is if you want to get better, you will have to start somewhere, and your entry is to allow yourself to feel, so that you can notice how you fight this feeling … and then consciously stop resisting, fighting, complaining, rejecting it. Unless you actually do it, you can never find out if the feeling itself diminishes when you stop fighting it, or not.

Vineeto: Then have a look at your resentment. Perhaps you can see (to a small degree at first) how silly it is to waste energy in objecting to being here, since it is a fact that you are here.

Scout: Yea I feel resentment a lot. I’m unable to work even a kind of chill home job right now bc I have been dealing with some weird medical symptoms that leave me constantly fatigued and slight stress provokes sometimes scary symptoms. I’m scared I won’t be able to support myself, but I’m also scared that things will get worse if I keep working since that’s been the trajectory thus far. I’m decently young too so most of my peers are out enjoying their lives and I’m in bed a lot of the time, I know comparatives aren’t helpful but I really wish I could function normally and that basic stuff like eating wasn’t a source of constant pain.
I don’t think any of these feelings are serving me in getting better. But it feels like I can’t help it; when I sit with myself long enough I cry like a scared child in pain.

Ok, resentment is a form of socially accepted anger (mostly turned in on oneself), and must have been brewing for a long time … so long that, not dealing with it, you developed psycho-somatic “scary symptoms” and aren’t able to earn a living. Therefore, this too seems to be a rather urgent topic to tackle sooner rather than later.

Now that you acknowledge that resentment operates in you, you can go ahead and sincerely and dispassionately contemplate what the benefits and damages are that resentment creates. It must be fairly obvious to you that the harm outweighs the benefits by a large margin, no? A sincere and clear seeing of this fact will evince action (if/when there be sincere intent to be happy and harmless).

Claudiu made a very perspicacious observation –

Claudiu: But if you want to maintain feelings of justified resentment and woe is me, then you will reject the new habits, via often clever and cunning mechanisms like saying it’s too hard or doesn’t really work or only works for some people etc. This lets you continue in your old ways, which you know don’t work, but this way you can maintain a self-image that it’s out of your control and nothing you can do about it. (link)

Vineeto: Once you genuinely recognize and acknowledge that ‘you’ are your feelings (including your feelings about pain) then you find that you do have a choice about how you want to experience being alive.

Scout: I can’t see this clearly yet honestly. I see that I do have a choice as to whether to engage narratives around certain feelings with my attention, and that if I stop giving those narratives attention then the feelings lose their edge, and diminish sooner. I don’t feel in control of what emotions arise in a given moment at all, just in how I respond to them.
I’ll keep exploring. I appreciate the engagement. (link)

You are welcome.

You are indeed not “in control of what emotions arise” but you constantly try to be in control by fighting and objecting and resenting all these unwanted feelings which arise. Wanting to be in control requires a ‘controller’ and something to be ‘controlled’ (your feelings). Therefore you split yourself into two – a form of dissociation (additionally to the dissociation of suppressing the feelings themselves).

When this dissociation stops (via personal insight into this self-inflicted phenomenon) then you can experientially grasp that the whole process (controller and controlled) is ‘you’, the psychological and psychic-emotional identity trying to prevent ‘you’ from changing the status quo.

Perhaps you first need to succeed in not fighting nor suppressing unwanted feelings (and experience how they diminish when you don’t feed them by objecting) before you can grasp experientially that you don’t have feelings but that you are your feelings and that your feeling are ‘you’, the passionate instinctual identity.

Cheers Vineeto

[Ian]

Just wanting to add another flavour of the same thing:

Maybe step back a bit first to go forward - Start with being kind to yourself - it’s ok to have those feelings of resentment, they make sense, they arise or are there because it’s natural, it’s what a feeling being ought to feel given who you are and your particular enculturation…that’s a great way to stop fighting it, it’s fine, it’s ok, nothing is going to go wrong just because you feel what you feel, certainly no worse if not no better….

Maybe things in your life really have sucked from a feeling being point of view and so it makes total sense that feeling resentful is one of your ways of being.

Is it happy and harmless? No, but that’s ok, we are not there yet (in this exploration), we are only at the point of stopping fighting being the feelings, fighting ourselves…for me this was a necessary step which then lifted the doors to feeling happy…

Yes these ways of being are habitual, but to experience that as a fact, embody (em-be?) Em-be your feelings…for you are them and they are you…Then you’ll have the choice, the choice of how you want to be…

Don’t try and skip to the end, it’s easy to try to, especially if you’re good at thinking things through, but the process is experiential, and might need a slow, gentle examination of your experience, lots of pauses, waiting for experiential answers to arise…and they will, with the intent and willingness and curiosity and desire to change. It’s totally doable - and I spent years stuck in the same boat also, wondering why I couldn’t make progress - relinquishing resenting life is so key and for obvious reasons

[Felix]

@vineeto is fully actually free and so her advice is obviously much more rock solid than mine when it comes to the human condition and the deep workings of the self.

Here are some thoughts from me as someone who has gone through, and to a degree is going through, something similar.

I know exactly what you are talking about when you describe your predicament (at least my own version), where essentially your mental state is causing you to feel, and perhaps to some degree perhaps also be, physically ill.

There is a lot to investigate here as to what’s going on. Actualism isn’t about wishful thinking or a quick fix, there is work that goes into “finding out how one ticks” - and that is no less the case here.

For me my issue was complete and utter burnout - a chronic stress condition which plagued me every moment of the day. It brought with it very real physical symptoms; affected my sleep, made me gain weight etc etc and of course the actual kind of “‘mental pain” which is perhaps the biggest symptom. Above all it was like my mind was in a mess, and I couldn’t remember what it was like to feel normal (let alone good).

One thing I found was that there was a huge amount of background FEAR associated with this “condition” I had seemed to have developed.
I knew on an intellectual level it was likely somatic but nonetheless, beyond how I felt emotionally, there was a very strong physical presence of pain and sickness that reinforced my mental narratives about everything. This is a very clear feedback loop, you felt bad consistently enough that it created a somatic condition; and now the somatic condition is proof that you should feel bad.

I oftentimes find myself reacting very strongly to the physical symptoms, exhaustion etc I am feeling when this kind of burnout state gets retriggered. But I find I am able to get on top of this each moment again with a lot of intent and by being very attentive when those feeling reactions to the symptoms pop up. Humans are fear driven as it is; and it can really become a kind of endless spiral where you never feel good enough to feel physically well within your own body.

Put it this way, assuming you’ve accounted for the fact you don’t have any health issues in a deep sense, what caused these somatic issues in the first place? Bad feelings right. If you had felt happy and well then you wouldn’t have ended up in this state. And you obviously want to feel healthy and well right? So if you continue feeling bad that would just perpetuate the situation right?

So then the question becomes, can you feel good within your circumstances (despite exhaustion or somatic issues or whatever else)? And the answer is yes, but it requires a lot of naïveté and attentiveness in order to stop the constant panicking which is making you sicker and sicker.

Once back at my peak burnout stage I told Richard how deeply exhausted I felt and his reply was “well enjoy and appreciate feeling exhausted then”.

I was baffled by that answer, because I had so much physical proof that I was in a dire situation and that wellness was the opposite of what I was experiencing. It was like he was asking me to enjoy sitting on an ants nest.

I was hearing “feel good, feel good” but it felt very far away, and like no one could understand. I felt stuck between the rock of the real world (not able to function that well and wanting out of the human condition) and actualism (advice about feeling good that I couldn’t get to work)

A few things:

• I think it’s a good idea that you are taking time off work. I’d be doing whatever you can to cut yourself some slack, rest, do some quiet or enjoyable activities etc etc. I’d advise daily Zone 2 cardio (doesn’t stress the body) like some bike riding. Obviously sleep hygiene as well, limiting screen time, reading books etc.

• By the same token, just as a sensibility thing, it’s obviously a good idea to limit anything that might be contributing to your issues. You mentioned numbing for example, whatever that was alluding to. It might also be work stress, perhaps difficult family relationships etc etc. It’s very distracting to have that sort of thing going on.

• Why not start to look at the psychological nature of this somatic condition? Ok there are some physical symptoms but you essentially know it’s psychological - so try to take a look at it more objectively, like a diagnostic. For example, notice when you are being hypervigilant to these symptoms, or reinforcing them by complaining about them emotionally-speaking. Use naïveté and a gentle, friendly, approach to start to question and reduce your hyper-reactivity.

• See if you can start to separate the psychological from the physical. Let’s say you get headaches or an itchy scalp or shaking hands…to the degree that some of that stuff is already happening, you can’t change it right? So it’s silly to keep worrying about it, panicking about it, willing it to stop etc etc. Especially when doing so is adding to it, and milking the suffering further.

• Don’t forget the feeling good part in all of this. Are there any times that you feel good, that these symptoms abate etc? If so, notice these times. Try to become familiar with the state of feeling good in the little moments where you are closer to that. Appreciate those moments as well. Then, if you start to feel bad - what took you out of it? Did you start to get some of the somatic symptoms? Did a work thing or a personal thing suddenly jolt you into stress mode? Did you have a sleepless night and wake up exhausted?

• Don’t forget to be a friend to yourself. Try to watch out for habits of kicking yourself, feeling ashamed, bemoaning your fate etc all of which fuels the condition. It’s ok to be where you are at - recognise it’s the human condition and that there is no fault in the situation, but that you have the opportunity to do something about it.

If you feel resentment for the fact you are even in this situation - realise that this sort of back pressure might actually help you make progress sooner if you use it. If you can work out how to go from feeling very bad to a bit bad; then you will be able to eventually get all the way to feeling excellent.

At the end of the day, actualism is about the fact that the psyche is not actual - so the aim is to figure out how “you” are operating…in the first instance to reduce and eliminate the somatic issues; and then more generally to be happy and harmless and eventually free of the human condition altogether