Vineeto: So now that you know how to drop resentment for one issue, by the same means it is easy to drop any other resentment each time you become aware of one. It is immensely liberating to take charge of your life in that you don’t blame other people and outside events to how you feel.
Alexander: Yes. And it’s getting easier to nip it in the bud. Hearing Richard talk about that in one of the videos was really nice.
Hi Alexander,
Yes, Richard summed it up really succinctly and expertly. It is quite easy to nip the minor resentments in the bud.
Nevertheless, some of them may be persistent – and you know which ones they are because they keep reoccurring – and then you will do some further investigation about the issue – it could be a belief or a principle or an ideal or even a truth taken for a fact.
Richard: The phrase ‘nipping them in the bud’ is not to be confused with either suppression/ repression or ignoring/ avoiding … it is to be consciously and deliberatively – with knowledge aforethought – declining oh-so-sensibly to futilely go down that well-trodden path to nowhere fruitful yet again.
Also, it is good to not confuse ‘nipping in the bud’ with suppressing the feeling.
Richard: It is impossible to be a ‘stripped-down’ self – divested of feelings – for ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’. Anyone who attempts this absurdity would wind up being somewhat like what is known in psychiatric terminology as a ‘sociopathic personality’ (popularly know as ‘psychopath’). Such a person still has feelings – ‘cold’, ‘callous’, ‘indifferent’ – and has repressed the others. (Richard, List B, No. 19e, 26 Dec 2000)
Vineeto: The reason is that good and evil are two sides of the same coin and both arise out of the instinctual animal passions – fear and aggression, nurture and desire.
Alexander: I’m seeing more clearly all the time that there are no solutions to be found in the human condition. People enjoy fighting and justifying it with self righteousness. Self righteousness gives you a high, and a confidence that being aggressive is a good thing. I can’t count the times I’ve felt bad and had to apologize because I acted out of that sense of rightness.
I remember feeling being ‘Vineeto’ had a few topics ‘she’ repeatedly became self-righteous about. ‘This is not fair’ was the most persistent, not only when it was in regards to ‘herself’ but even more so when it happened to others.
Therefore I know that such emotional reactions cannot be simply ‘nipped in the bud’, it takes a closer look, and sometimes a quite comprehensive look at what makes you ‘tick’ in regards to self-righteousness.
Here Richard talks about his personal experience with righteousness –
Richard: Speaking personally, the feeling-being inhabiting this flesh-and-blood body all those years ago instantaneously rid ‘himself’ of the bulk of those school-age hurts and slights – whilst sitting out in the sunshine one fine morning, putting pencil to paper in order to finally record those dastardly events for posterity, as per a long-held and cherished ambition to do so at length – via seeing-in-a-flash that, as it was simply not possible to ever physically be a child again (and thus juvenilely susceptible to not only those bully-boys and feisty-femmes but any enabling teachers and principals as well), there was absolutely no need whatsoever to continue nursing them as a carryover grudge. It soon became increasingly apparent, thereafter, how those childhood hurts had been vital to the maintenance of the righteous indignation which fuelled ‘his’ plaints of injustice (a.k.a. ‘unfairness’) and, thus, ‘his’ mission to bring justice (a.k.a. ‘fairness’) to the world.
Also, with the dissolution of those childhood hurts the (deeply felt) need for any aggressive tit-for-tat modus vivendi also vanishes – leaving one free to treat all others as fellow human beings rather than as adversaries to gain dominion over. (Richard, Selected Correspondence, Aggression, 21 Jan 2016).
The next quote is also quite revealing in that as long as you believe in the truth of what is considered right and what is wrong, you will potentially react with righteous anger when coming across injustice, unfairness, or ‘this is just wrong’ and the likes – and there is plenty of it in the world as it is with people as they are. Also, emotionally accepting what is intellectually unacceptable helps a lot with restoring feeling good.
It is important that pure intent needs to be firmly in place before any whittling away of the otherwise essential societal/ cultural conditioning be undertaken.
Richard: As a matter of related interest … one of the most persistent forms of anger is indignation (or righteous anger/ justifiable anger): it can be eradicated rather simply by the realisation that its raison d’être – a guardian against injustice, unjustness, unfairness, inequality (partiality, discrimination, and so on) – is as much a human invention as those concepts it defends … justice, justness, fairness, equality (impartiality, indiscrimination, and so on).
I have touched upon this elsewhere:
• [Richard]: ‘There is no ‘chaos’ and ‘order’ as a ‘sub-stratum of the universe’ … they are but human inventions and do not exist in actuality. The same applies to fairness/ unfairness, justice/ injustice and any other human concepts that, whilst being useful for human-to-human interaction, are futility in action when applied to the universe. Male logic is as useless as female intuition when it comes to being free: the everyday reality of the ‘real-world’ is a veneer ‘I’ paste over the top of the pristine actual world by ‘my’ very being … and ‘being’ is the savage/ tender instinctual passions (giving rise to feelings of malice/ love and sorrow/ compassion etc., with the resultant concepts of bad/ good and evil/ god and so on) which cripples intelligence by invariably producing dualistic concepts.
‘Tis all a fantasy … feelings rule in the human world’. (Richard, List B, No. 33c, 3 Aug 2000).
(Richard, AF List, No. 66, 27 Apr 2005a).
Vineeto: Now apply the same tool [for giving up resentment] the moment you become affectively aware that you blame someone/ something else for feeling bad and see how silly that is to spoil your only moment of being alive by feeling bad. Some people even blame the weather for feeling bad!
Alexander: The weather. It seems the instinctual self just doesn’t want to be here at all.
Oh, but the instinctual self is programmed and bent on survival at all cost – it’s called the survival instinct.
Alexander: I want to give ‘myself’ what ‘he’ wants. Oblivion.
Mmh, who is the one who wants “to give ‘myself’” and who is “‘he’” who wants “oblivion”? And who is “the instinctual self”, which “just doesn’t want to be here at all”?
Now that you sorted all your different impulses and wishes into separate boxes, are you any closer to solving the problem of feeling bad?
Here is a hint – all of this is ‘you’ – the swirling instinctual passions and accompanying emotions changing expression according to the triggers and circumstances, all arising from the same genetic programming.
You are your feelings, and that’s why nobody actually prevents you from feeling good or forces you to feel bad. It is in your hands, and being sincerely interested, paying diligent and eventually fascinated attention, to how you affectively experience this moment of being alive will give you more and more clues how you ‘tick’ and how you can choose feeling good now and channel the affective energy towards the happy and harmless feelings.
Alexander: I’ve been having very brief PCE while trying to fall asleep. I’ve been thinking about the one last night all day. And trying to not try to let it happen again .
What happened last night? And why are you “trying to not try to let it happen again”?
Alexander: And yes that’s the Richard quote I was looking for. Thank you for your time and insight. It is greatly appreciated. (link)
You are very welcome.
Cheers Vineeto