Chrono: Square one is the recognition of how ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’. Because when you change how you feel by being a different feeling, there’s nothing to solve or think about.
Hi Chrono,
Let me insert a vital step before your “square one” – getting back to feeling good once you discover that your enjoyment and appreciation has diminished. Unless you are at least feeling good any thinking about/ investigation into your emotions will go round in circles.
Richard: What the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago would do is first get back to feeling good and then, and only then, suss out where, when, how, why – and what for – feeling bad happened as experience had shown ‘him’ that it was counter-productive to do otherwise.
What ‘he’ always did however, as it was often tempting to just get on with life then, was to examine what it was all about within half-an-hour of getting back to feeling good (while the memory was still fresh) even if it meant sometimes falling back into feeling bad by doing so … else it would crop up again sooner or later.
Nothing, but nothing, can be swept under the carpet. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, AF List, No. 68c, 31 May 2005).
Chrono: Yet I would still feel this literal discomfort in my head. Some deep tendency makes me almost tend towards splitting myself and trying to “work” on ‘myself’ this way. (…)
Your “literal discomfort” and “deep tendency” “towards splitting myself” would be because, unless getting back to feeling good, ‘I’ am (automatically) dissociating from my feelings in order “to ‘work’ on ‘myself’ this way”.
Chrono: Be friends with myself. Be gentle with myself. This will also be reflected onto others. If I am friends with myself and gentle with myself, then I can be so with others. (…)
Even though Richard used the word ‘gentle’ in the Audiotaped Dialogues, Silly or Sensible –
R: This is a lot easier than that new-age one about not being judgemental. ‘I shouldn’t be judgemental!’ or ‘I’m always evaluating, judging everything and everyone’. This is a much more gentle way of being with oneself. Be kind to yourself – one needs all the help one can get and who is the best person to help you if not you yourself? [Emphasis added].
– he did not suggest that you “be gentle with” yourself. On the contrary, in many of his correspondences he emphasises that sincerity is the key to naiveté and sincerity requires that one be ruthlessly honest with oneself.
Respondent: … To pursue matters ‘ruthlessly’ may ‘do the trick’ but I think it produces a fanatic. [snip] In my personal experience I was taught by a therapist (who happened to be a Buddhist) to use the same method. Each session was spent reporting the results of my observations and exploring material as it emerged from my body in this moment. I learnt that every feeling I had could be observed in my body. We experimented with different ‘probes’ or intents if you will and turned up some primal material at times. I’d say that I explored some instinctual material but I don’t really know how to tell the difference from other material. My therapist recommended a gentle approach to observation. I used to get frustrated and want to ‘cut to the chase’ but I saw the results of my hard-headedness in a few interesting sessions. My gentle minded therapist was able to coax a trapped and extremely scared ‘child’ from the depths of my guts. The child was terrified of me and would only emerge when the therapist was around. Why was that? Because at the time I was a cold hearted brute to myself and my observational capacity was limited by that. My therapist believed that the quality and character of observation was as important as the content of the observation. There may well be a ‘cunning alien entity’ hijacking your bodily resources in a parasitical manner but it’s probably good to be aware that while you can smash the entity ruthlessly on the head, your goolies may be caught in its mandibles.
Ruthlessness is a good way to send material underground.
Richard: Here is what the word ‘ruthless’ means to me:
• ruthless [from ruth + -less.]: having no pity or compassion; pitiless, merciless. (Oxford Dictionary).
Where a Buddhist therapist recommends a ‘gentle approach to observation’ they would, more than likely, be advocating ‘metta’ (Pali for ‘loving-kindness’) and ‘karuna’ (Pali for ‘pity-compassion’) else they would not be in accord with the four fundamental Buddhist principles known as ‘brahma-vihara’ (divine-abidings) – the other two are ‘mudita’ (‘gladness at others’ success’) and ‘upekkha’ (‘onlooking equanimity’) – and needless is it to say that metta and/or karuna are as good a way as any for the cunning alien entity (an affective entity at root) to escape detection and survive to live yet another day in which to wreak its havoc in the world at large?
And in a similar vein here is what the words ‘pitiless’, ‘merciless’, and ‘relentless’ mean to me:
• pitiless [from pity + -less]: without compassion; showing no pity; merciless. (Oxford Dictionary).
• merciless [from mercy + -less]: without mercy; showing no mercy; pitiless, unrelenting. (Oxford Dictionary).
• relentless [from relent + -less]: incapable of relenting; pitiless; insistent and uncompromising. (Oxford Dictionary).
Anyone who asks themself, each moment again, how they are experiencing this moment of being alive – the only moment one is ever alive – whilst under the influence of ruth (compassion, pity; the feeling of sorrow for another) and/or pity (compassion, sympathy; clemency aroused by the suffering or misfortune of another) and/or mercy (disposition to forgive or show compassion) and/or relent (yield; give up a previous determination or obstinacy; become merciful/lenient, show mercy/pity; abate; slacken, relinquish, abandon) is surely just wasting their time … frittering away the opportunity of a lifetime on but more of the ‘Tried and Failed’ in yet another guise.
‘Tis not for nothing that the alien entity is described as ‘cunning’. (Richard, AF List, No. 56a, 10 Jan 2004a)
To be friends with yourself and abandon the habit of putting yourself down for any or all feelings and cunning ways of the identity you discover is vital – pat yourself on the back and appreciate what your dared to discover and acknowledge – but the words “be gentle” indicate hesitancy, guardedness, caution, yielding and treading lightly in the process of uncovering any aspect of the human condition in yourself (just like the Buddhistic therapist in the above correspondence).
Chrono: The only way to do that was to stay with the feeling. The instinctual tendency perhaps is to do one or the other and go back and forth. Then as I tried to do neither, I started to get inklings of an answer. I see-sawed back and forth between being this feeling and then the seeing that it was ‘me’ in my entirety that was standing in the way of complete peace and harmony. This seeing has such a vast understanding and implication to it that my mind seems like it’s being turned upside down. One take away was also the seeing why it was all not so easy. Something I didn’t think perhaps I had but I have to ashamedly admit that I had been holding this entire time. Basically, I had been harboring the basic resentment of being alive this entire time. This seeing took the edge off the underlying feeling.
The actualism method is epitomised by “the minimisation of both the malicious/ sorrowful feelings (the ‘bad’ feelings) and their antidotal loving/ compassionate feelings (the ‘good’ feelings) in concert with the maximisation of the felicitous/ innocuous feelings”, the only reason “to stay with the feeling” is when you have difficulty to comprehend “that to be living this moment – the only moment you are ever alive – by feeling bad is to be frittering away a vital opportunity to be fully alive …” (Richard, AF List, No. 79, 21 Jun 2005)
Now that you discovered that basic resentment is the reason that your feeling bad persisted you can begin to appreciate being here –
Richard: But one has to want to be here on this planet … most people resent being here and wish to escape. This method will bring one into being more fully here than anyone has ever been before. (Richard, List B, No. 19, 17 Mar 1998).
Chrono: So I started reading up Richard’s correspondence on Resentment. I reflected on this initial question: “Can I emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable?”. I actually don’t understand how something can be “intellectually unacceptable” or how it’s being used in this question. Is the lack of peace-on-earth intellectually unacceptable? I always saw it as emotionally unacceptable. But Richard writes:
Richard: Speaking personally, as a preliminary step twenty-odd years ago, I started to embrace each situation that life provided by emotionally welcoming, readily consenting to, receiving fully and unabashedly acknowledging every circumstance so as to find out, once and for all, just what was going on … and just what intelligence actually was. (Richard, List B, James2, 20 Aug 2001).
Chrono: So that is what I will try and maintain.
For instance, murder is intellectually unacceptable, as are wars, domestic violence, child abuse and many other behaviours of feeling beings, and to intellectually accept those would be to insult/ compromise/ cripple one’s intelligence. Whereas, when one emotionally accepts that which is intellectually unacceptable then intelligence becomes apparent, is no longer being obscured by one’s feelings in the given situation.
The other hint ‘Vineeto’ found very useful was to put everything on a preference basis – ‘I’ preferred to be a situation or preferred a thing to be in a particular way but if it did not happen/ be that way it didn’t matter. It made unconditional enjoyment so much easier.
Chrono: I continued the fascinated attention to the discomfort over the course of the week. Over time I started noticing that I was feeling more and more upset with the smallest of things that people did or how they behaved. Yesterday it went up to a crescendo of deep bitterness and encompassed everything. Every little thing people did (even unrelated to me) felt like a coil around my being. I experienced it as I wrote in my journal above as a “conditioning of resentment and bitterness that is coiled around naivete”. Then at the end of the day it just automatically eased up and that same discomfort was greatly diminished. The same night I experienced an elevated sensuousness. I was not even trying to do it, it just happened on its own. (link)
Ha … I wonder if the “fascinated attention to the discomfort” – in the name of practicing the actualism method – contributed to the maintaining and continuing of the discomfort, when you could instead have gone back to feeling good before enquiring into the nature/ reason of your discomfort. Something to try next time.
I am pleased to hear that this period of discomfort eased up and you are able to experience “an elevated sensuousness” now, after you discovered its cause of the basic resentment to being here.
You may also find the following correspondence relevant, a discovery regarding a basic seriousness which stands in the way of enjoyment and naiveté –
Respondent: I came to this when I realized that I wasn’t steering directly for felicity a lot of the time; and that when I was steering for it, there was a limit to how much I could find. While looking for more of it, I became increasingly aware that seriousness and aching seemed to characterize a good deal of my experience. I had read many of your statements about being serious, such as how seriousness ‘actively works against peace-on-earth’ – and thought I was applying them, but I didn’t realize how much seriousness was there(1). (see more: Richard, AF List, No. 82 , 3 Jan 2006)
Cheers Vineeto