The text convo this afternoon, on top on the contemplating about blame and shame, has simplified everything today.
No blame. No shame.
The logic is bulletproof.
Blind Nature> Body> ‘me’> everything I think, feel, am.
How could anything be my fault?
It’s better than “nothing ultimately matters”, because that is to easily misconstrued into I don’t ultimately matter. Which can’t be observed, because it’s an assertion about the future.
It’s easier to go straight to the observable facts.
“Blinding the lens with the focus”
Nai Palm, Hiatus Kaiyote
I’ve been enjoying doing some writing, otherwise resting and sleeping.
I went for a walk, and in usual fashion, it’s not until the last mile that something clicks.
I’ve been reflecting on @Kub933 observations that investigating can become far too granular (my word) and it’s useful to see the “outline” of myself. The big picture, the landscape.
Also he observed that one can invent things to investigate just to have tried to fixed something.
So, while I am still physically recovering, and staying at home alone isn’t naturally fun, nothing much is really there to look at. It’s more a landscape. An understandable set of feelings based in facts. It’s not naturally fun to be on antibiotics deliberately doing not much at all. I did mow the front lawn though. It was a ridiculous jungle!
I am excited to buy a suitable laptop tomorrow for sitting on the couch. My current one is a gaming laptop which would slow cook my legs if I used it in my preferred lounge chair. It’s also my means of income, so I wouldn’t want to have it overheating.
I was feeling very bored/ lonely today. Spent quite a few hours looking at tablets, but was uncomfortable making any purchase.
Went for my usual walk eventually, and decided to try “neither expressing or repressing” the boredom.
It was interesting. How the ego and soul interact with each other. How the thinker and feeler are both intertwining continually. The actualist ego, thinking actualist thoughts, trying to “neither express or repress” whilst the soul carries on in the grey hinterland of boredom/ resentment.
Had some reasonable success. Mainly avoiding rumination, and otherwise noticing the interplay of my “better self” trying to understand how to examine such an all pervasive, but otherwise subtle feeling landscape.
I felt it grow and rise in my chest. All the while thinking, “well, this is my first attempt, seems to be going ok”.
Later, when I got home, a reoccurring rumination about what I would say to my recent ex started.
I noticed the irritation in the boredom and loneliness. I started to think about a very infamous mass murderer (Bryant, Port Arthur massacre), about how desperately lonely he was. He had a lot of money and would buy airplane tickets just to have someone to talk to.
Because this is a public forum, I will preface the following by saying; in no way am I about to “snap” and the feelings described were still very subtle.
I imagined shooting my ex, then killing myself. Not a long drawn out fantasy, but rather a scenario which was spontaneously occurred in a chain of thoughts, on reflecting on the worst consequences of loneliness, allowing me to feel more of what was in the rumination. I could feel anger there and realised that a good sized component of the boredom/resentment was actually repressed anger.
Edit: because of the seriousness of that particular thought, I should better explain how it can about, in case anyone in the future interpreted that it’s actualism to fantasize about killing people. What actually happened, in order, was noticing that a) I was lonely b) that my thoughts had turned to my ex c) I noticed the powerlessness of the imaginary conversation, d) I wondered about others who felt lonely and powerlessness, e) I noticed an anger rising f) I related this to my general knowledge of “crimes of passion” and Bryant came to mind g) in a brief second the thought of murder and suicide occured h) I noticed that it wasn’t morality suppressing the actions but rather my identity as a good father. i) on seeing that suppressed anger was there, I immediately started feeling good.
The interesting part of that brief fantasy was the feeling which arose when the fantasy murder/suicide was complete. It was nothing to do with the “right or wrong” of the fantasy, but rather; what my sons would think of me. (again, this was a few seconds of rumination about loneliness and exploring the irritation in the rumination about an imaginary conversation; I am not enraged or about to snap!).
For more context, I have really taken on board the fact that ‘I’ am a blind instinctual being. Another installation of blind nature’s ‘self’ program. None of this is personal, and none of it needs to be hidden away.
Having seen the repressed anger, it was instantly relieving and easy to have it fade away.
Richard;
" It is incumbent upon one to stand fast, as a flesh and blood body only, without moving in any direction at all … and be what-one-is. Only in this manner will the instincts reveal themselves for what they are. ‘I’ will be laid open and the core of ‘me’ will be revealed for the blind and instinctualbeing’ that ‘I’ am…"
This is actually fantastic explaining about how to “neither express or repress” a feeling.
I did try to be more interested, in the face of the boredom, but that seemed like trying to change the feeling without understanding it. I thought about Vineeto’s advice about " putting a feeling on the table, walking around it and asking, ’ what’s so good about this feeling?'".
However, I just tried to stick with walking and feeling it. Letting it be felt with the minimum of interference I could manage.
RICHARD: G’day No. 33, In regards to your first query, ‘not expressing’ does indeed refer to thoughts/ thinking, as well as actions/ behaviour, and to not have either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feelings fuelling thoughts (feeling-fed thinking), as well as no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feelings fuelling actions (feeling-impelled behaviour), is to have all of the affective energy channelled into the felicitous and innocuous feelings (the happy and harmless feelings).
Emphasis added.
This is indeed where I failed to be sincere all these years. I wouldn’t look at the way rumination/ fantasy was interplaying with the deeper nebulous feelings.
This is certainly why so much is “under the carpet” and is currently being looked at for the first time.
I am tempted to be embarrassed. Or maybe it’s the foolish feeling of naivete peeking out. How could I have been so silly? However, Mr Onionman has never once apologised, so neither will I.
Interesting to read about somebody else’s description of repressed anger.
Even before AF, I had this sort of not wanting to add more suffering into the universe type mentality. I always sought to try and resolve issues without aggression or anger. There has clearly been many times I have repressed/suppressed anger.
With my recent brush of anger/aggression due to my kids being bullied, it quickly evolved from feeling angry towards the kids involved, especially the ring leader, then to their parents, who must be punished for their failings. Then it morphed into all people who were dicks, they should all just die, there is no resolving this problem other than their annihilation. Then my rage turned to humanity itself. Our entire species deserves suffering and extinction because more dicks will always just be created. The only way to guarantee no more dicks is absolute extinction.
It is like, I intellectually know that a human isn’t to blame for the human condition so I find it hard to maintain that anger towards somebody who most likely lacks awareness as to why they do anything they do, blindly following where their emotions and beliefs have taken them. My anger then seems to need to channel to some deserving individual or group that must suffer. Then it seems to take this path of desiring species extinction. My anger always seems to end up at this ludicrous point.
It is quite terrifying to see that interplay but also kind of hilarious in retrospect. Like so silly and over the top.
I have never wanted to accept that I have anger and aggression, I can see throughout my life I have tried to repress it. I will grind my teeth or moments my anger surfaced would be passive aggressively.
It has let me see some other interesting feelings I have towards humanity, like disappointment with our species and the predictableness of the human condition.
Talking with @jamesjjoo , I had an insight into how I interact with writing about actualism.
I previously thought that I hadn’t been carefully reading actualism because I had been so thoroughly disappointed with doing that as a child/ young adult in Christianity.
However, I think it may be the reverse.
Back then I knew that something was wrong with what I was reading, versus my experience of Christianity. Something was definitely out of whack.
So, instead of it being a disappointment, it’s actually the habit of dismissing what I am reading as I automatically assume the writer is full of shit. ( Or less dramatically, really missing the essence of something deeper or more profound)
I had a good time reading the “resources” pinned in the actualism category. Some nice progress by Claudiu in the new wiki as well!
It’s somewhere in the middle. There is both happening when I read.
There is digging to find some “secret sauce” , which is obviously respecting that the writer has the recipe, and also a dismissing of the writing, which is the disappointment kicking in.
However, neither are required when reading Richard. He is being explicit when writing. There is, to the best of his experience and skill, nothing being hidden from the reader.
So there is no “secret sauce” , and no need to be disappointed upon not finding a “secret sauce”.
It’s all actions. Actions of mind and body.
No esoteric magic, no elevated entrance on a pedestal up a mountain,
Reading @FrankN s Evernotes really clarified so much for me.
It’s all the same thing. The actualism method, with it’s actualist affective awareness, neither expressing or repressing, emotionally accepting the intellectually unacceptable, ‘i’ am my ‘feelings’, realising it is always now, and always here…
When feeling good ceases, or hasn’t started, I have the option to neither express or repress what is happening emotionally. I find it unacceptable that feeling good isn’t happening, however I am my feelings, so the answer is always right here and now in my experience.
Is something suppressed? Quite possibly. Being the feeling, without trying to tamper with it, teases out details.
Ah, a hint of irritation.
A touch of boredom.
A sprinkle of unrequited desire.
Embarrassed about being a bad actualist.
Envy.
Hmm, so many little vortices. All weakly, yet impenetrably combined to remain hidden in plain sight.
As @geoffrey said in his report of becoming free, ending “my precious”.
Of all the things that feeling being Vineeto wrote, this one stands out to me, and I am paraphrasing;
“When one sets there intention to becoming happy, one will have the drama one has to have, until one has had enough of it”.
That could easily sum up the last 5-40 thousand years of human history too.
The last few months, whilst seemingly heading in the opposite direction of relationship intimacy, whilst sick, broken bone and body, an emotional “maturity” has come about. The Mummy’s boy grew up.
But enough of that poetic licence.
As useful as my story may well prove, whatever I am will end. On becoming free, there will be no story, nothing I can relate too. Nothing left of the ‘humanity’ in me.
It really is quite astounding that going in the opposite direction, whether deliberately or by default, something definitely is clicking.
Although it’s definitely a conditional happiness to chat with Geoffrey, it’s also a glimpse of this thing that has been daily on my mind for a decade; a freedom from the seriousness of being ‘me’.
It’s awesome to see this ‘new Andrew’, it seems a couple of months ago something shifted for you and now it’s all cylinders firing towards getting it done
Shame I missed out on the video call as I was at work, hopefully next time.
