Bub introduction

[claudiu]

@bub

Thanks for taking the time, Claudiu. It’s appreciated

Of course! It’s a fun thing to do for me

@bub

100% it’s better to feel good rather than bad, but life has it’s ups AND downs.

Indeed! You can’t do anything about the events in your life having ups and downs. You don’t have total ultimate control over your circumstances. But you will come to see that you do always have a choice how you react to or feel about life’s ups and downs.

This is one of the key revolutionary paradigm-shifting aspects of actualism – you see that it is always your choice, and your choice alone, how you experience being alive. You can’t control that someone cuts you off in traffic – but you can choose whether to get upset about this, or whether to not let it diminsh even the tiniest bit from your enjoyment of being alive.

This is really difficult to grasp and see that this is how it is in its totality. It took me many years! But it should be easy to see that you at least have somewhat of a choice. I always thought of it like comparing different people reacting to the same situation. Some people yell when they’re caught in traffic, or are sad when it rains – for others it doesn’t affect them at all (though other things do). So it’s easy to see it’s at least somewhat of a personal choice.

@bub

Maybe the issue is that it’s outside my current reality to feel good 100% of the time.

As @Kub933 said, as a feeling-being only at most 99.9% has been reported haha. And not by anyone on this forum. Although I have personally experienced multiple days in a row at this 99.9% level!

But when actually free it’s a different matter. But I can’t report on that from experience (yet).

@bub

Life will happen. If an ‘actually free’ person’s spouse or child had an accident, they were physically assaulted, lost their life savings, then the feeling bad will happen, however temporarily. Then a reframe takes place, timeline resets to now, followed by a mood reset back to feeling good (hopefully with practical concerns to resolve the situation taken care of).

Unless I’m mistaken and someone actually free would feel good all through lifes downs.

Indeed, an actually free person cannot feel bad, because the entity that would be feeling bad – the feeling-being – which is who ‘you’ think and feel ‘yourself’ to be – is gone entirely.

But when it’s put this way it’s common to immediately imagine actually free people as robots or zombies. Nothing is further from the truth. It’s just impossible to imagine that “bad” things happening in one’s life wouldn’t take away from one’s experience of the perfection and purity of the universe. The only way to really see this is to have a PCE for yourself.

Also note that when actually free you don’t “feel” good, per se. The entire affective faculty is gone along with the ‘self’ and the ‘Self’. But it’s not that it leaves a ‘hole’ in its place, an empty void. Rather it’s the other way around – there is a seamless whole and perfect exquisite experience of being alive (as I have seen in my PCEs) and you see that emotions (including felicitous ones) are what was the ‘hole’ in the first place. Or rather it’s more accurate to say that ‘I’ the feeling-being ‘myself’ was the hole. It’s just that the way ‘I’ as a feeling-being experience being alive is via emotions. There’s no distinction between ‘me’ and ‘my’ emotions – they are one and the same thing. This ‘me’ is what is the hole.

Also relevant, see this thread: Does an "actually free" person experience any emotions? .

@bub

Morbid fear of negative emotions or triggers"* isn’t actualism – indeed it’s silly to fear such things.

I saw the dealing with negative emotions flowchart and made an 'ass’umption that it was a significant part of the process. Thanks for clarifying that it isnt and indeed silly to fear such things.

Haha these things can be nuanced and tricky. It’s not that “dealing with negative emotions” isn’t a significant part of the process – it certainly can be (the extent to which it is is basically the extent to which you experience negative emotions) – but rather that it’s silly to fear them. Fearing them does not do anything productive. It just adds fear on top of the negative emotion already. Rather it’s about simply letting yourself become aware of them (i.e. not fearing them, not hiding from them, etc…) so that such awareness can lead you back to feeling good (because it’s better to feel good than to feel bad).

That being said, if you take a look at the flowchart again you’ll see that you’ve cherry-picked only half the equation.

From the flow-chart there is a ‘trigger’ arrow:

And you will see that what the ‘trigger’ arrow leads to, when not enjoyment and appreciation, is:

i.e. ‘negative emotions’ are only (an equal) half of the equation. The other half are the ‘positive emotions’. So it seems by your words you reveal that you have a bias regarding the negative emotions, as that’s the only thing that you saw when looking at this .

@bub

Ok, but instead of feeling bad in those minutes, hours, or days, wouldn’t it be, to put it simply, an improvement to life if you were feeling good instead?

Again, it’s outside my current reality to feel good all the time, because life and circumstances will happen and I will have what I feel are natural responses to it.

Not even big things like accident to spouse or child, but small things like being unkind to someone, or being rejected by a significant other, or even a beautiful stranger, can drop the mood for a few minutes.

Aye of course. That’s normal. It would be strange if your current reality already was feeling good all of the time.

But that’s where actualism comes in. You see that it’s possible – to at least feel significantly good for 99% of the time – and you can make changes in your life to make it happen. It’s really just a question of whether that’s appealing for you, and if so, the decision to start doing it.

From the examples you gave:

• why be unkind to someone in the first place if it diminishes feeling good? And if you have to be “unkind” (eg they are being unreasonable and you have to assert your interests) then why let that necessary course of action take away from feeling good?
• why let your feeling good depend on whether your significant other rejects you?
• why let your feeling good depend on whether a beautiful stranger rejects you? Isn’t it silly to hand over the reigns of your emotional state over to beautiful strangers?

@bub

Is your mood a 100% all the time, no matter what happens or there’s still some way to go?

I think it’s better to think of it as maximizing feeling good as much as possible, rather than going for 100%. It is always easy to see the next step of how it can be better – rather than trying to live up to a perfect ideal from the start.

That being said it’s not 100% or even 99% for me, but it’s really quite good. At least recently, feeling good has been normal, with dips below it being less common than not, and I clearly see them, they are separated from each other (they don’t all glom together into one ‘oh god this is all awful’), and I can get back to feeling good pretty quickly.

I find for me it goes in periods though. There are periods like this then periods of feeling bad for days in a row. But on a high level looking over the past few years, there is a clear and constant upward trend.

@bub

I know despite what you might feel about Srinath, I can get under his skin - hope I haven’t for years, and not even remotely intending to. But apart from the Richard, Vineeto, Peter references, I’d like some evidence of people feeling good 100% of the time.

Talk with Srinath more . Also if you were able to get under his skin many years ago but haven’t been able to for a few years, that’s something interesting isn’t it?

@bub

All I need to feel good is to be in the now. It’s only moving into future or past that can affect my or anybody’s mood. Unless it’s the rare instance, where I am in a crisis situation, the Now feels pretty peaceful pretty much all the time.

Peaceful is one thing… but what about actively enjoyable?

@bub

Take joy from the unconditional. Though I wonder if I have to get the practice with PCE’s to take joy from the conditional i.e. the environment around me.

The PCE is great because it shows you how it can be, and what to aim for. That being said it isn’t so hard to take joy from conditionally enjoyable things is it? That’s how most people live their lives . Enjoying the good things but not enjoying the bad things… It seems silly to try to make yourself enjoy some conditional thing that is objectively bad. If you stub your toe, it hurts, it’s silly to try to force yourself to enjoy the stubbing-of-the-toe per se. But if you think of it as, ok, I stubbed my toe, and it hurts, but is it worth feeling upset over it on top of experiencing this physical pain? No? Ok! Then you stub your toe without feeling upset about it

@bub

I can feel good, but feels a bit like trying to fall into the sensate experiences of things to get to a PCE. And hard to hold my concentration for longer than a couple to a few minutes. But if the juice is worth the squeeze, then I’m in.

Quite the contrary! That’s not the way to get to a PCE. If you are concentrating or squeezing then you’re going in the wrong direction. This is very critical cause doing this can lead you to an ASC (Altered State of Consciousness) which can superficially sound like the PCE in terms of sensate-only experience, but really the critical component - ‘you’ - are still there in the background. It can be hard to separate the ASCs out from the PCEs at first especially coming from a spiritual background.

The key is that it’s more about feeling good rather than experiencing the senses. If you are feeling good, you’re on the way to the PCE. If you’re feeling great, you’re even closer… if you are simply wondering and marveling at being alive on this verdant paradisical planet, then you are really close! Etc. It’s about how ‘you’ are, not about what senses you experience.

@bub

Does physical universe mean I have to immerse myself in the environment around me and appreciate it keep getting that PCE experience, till it’s an almost constant OR possible to feel PCE by just feeling good, and that can be built on.

It should be clear from what I just wrote above, but it’s the latter.

@bub

The way I’d put it is that when what you call Awareness is experiencing something unchanging, it’s not an actually existing unchanging thing, but an illusory one that your ‘Self’ is generating. Ego-self may be gone but soul-self is still there. It came into being with your body and will die along with your body.

This is something else that doesnt fit with my current reality - the awareness i speak of is the one referred to by the advaita guru’s i.e. completely unrelated to a egoic self.

Indeed, that’s what I wrote too - “ego-self may be gone” (i.e. “completely unrelated to a egoic self” – since this egoic self is gone) – but “soul-self is still there”. It’s this soul-self that is this awareness you speak of. The soul underlies the ego, comes before it. The ego is built on top of the soul. The soul is the material from which the ego is built. The soul is the seat of the psyche, the seat of ‘your’ emotions. It is who ‘you’ are at the core of ‘your’ ‘being’. This soul is this Awareness, ultimately.

But it only feels like it is unchanging… in actuality it is dependent on the body to exist. The experience of this Awareness is that it supercedes the body… but the experience is delusory . And I speak from personal experience.

@bub

Here again, I’m of the advaita view that that unchanging Awareness is something I can access at any time. And it looks like that this feeling good, constant PCE experience is something fundamentally different and feels a whole lot better to boot.

Yea! The amazing thing will be to watch this unconditional unchanging Awareness that can be accessed at any time, completely disappear along with that which was experiencing it, as you enter a PCE .

Cheers,
Claudiu