Vineeto: 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.
Chrono: Ah! I actually did need that reminder. Sometimes I get overwhelmed. Perhaps I have a tendency to more easily give weight and importance to negative feelings than felicitous feelings. They seem to have a more urgent feeling to them and perhaps even more ‘truth’ to them. It’s like once I am feeling good, then there’s really nothing to think about. There was really no reason to feel bad. It was all a self-fulfilling prophecy. I simply had indulged in them and perhaps the underlying resentment and seriousness gives rise to an obsessive urge or tendency to do something about it. And that in turn sustains the resentment and seriousness. The way I went about it though was misguided.
Hi Chrono,
I am pleased that getting back to feeling good before any investigation worked for you.
Vineeto: – 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.
Chrono: In this instance I was using the phrase “gentle with myself” to mean not telling myself off for not feeling good (which was counterproductive). I still maintain being insistent and uncompromising with myself albeit that quality was misplaced/ misdirected.
Vineeto: 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: I’d say it was because I had been going in circles feeling bad that I used the words “be gentle”. Since I hadn’t been making progress (due to not feeling good first and splitting myself instead), I thought perhaps it’s because I am just putting myself down too much. Of course all of that was not doing the actualism method and I had forgotten the vital step of getting back to feeling good first. I certainly see the ‘cunning’ part of the identity more now.
Thank you for the clarification. Most likely you have, like most feeling beings, been brought up to put yourself down, blame yourself first when something unexpected happens and then “splitting myself instead”. It is vital to recognize such habitual reaction and decline it each time it inveigles itself again. Nothing which affective attentiveness cannot fix when replaced with a more fortuitous and fruitful habit of patting yourself on the back for noticing it each time you catch it (a habit is best replaced with something better when you want to extract yourself from a destructive habit).
Vineeto: 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)
Chrono: Then definitely the “fascinated attention to the discomfort” – in the name of practicing the actualism method – contributed to the maintaining and continuing of the discomfort. The only thing I would say is that this is extremely persistent, so much so that if I do return to feeling good and try to look into it, I fall back into the same feeling pattern.
Indeed! The identity can be soo tricky when wanting to sell bad feelings as something virtuous, isn’t it.
Here I found an interesting snippet of conversation where Richard points out that the topic of tracking the feeling can change (without being noticed) –
Gary: I gave some thought as to whether I am ‘tracking’ the waking entity, and I think I am. I seem to go over the same emotions over and over again and the same repetitive thoughts until I give up the chase and relax, often to but take up the tracking the next day.
Richard: If it be not fun to track oneself in all of one’s doings then one might as well ‘give up the chase and relax’ … however what you describe as a modus operandi does not make sense to me (‘go over the same emotions over and over again and the same repetitive thoughts until I give up the chase and relax’).
To need to (and to be able to) ‘relax’ means there must be tension in the first place to relax from … thus the tracking down has changed from tracking down the ‘same emotions’ or the ‘same repetitive thoughts’ to tracking down the tension … and you did not notice that the game had changed horses in mid-stream. The need to ‘relax’ is a flashing red light that the game-play has changed: ‘when did this tension start?’; how did this tension begin?’; ‘what was the event that initiated this tension?’; ‘what were the feelings at the time?’; ‘what was the thought associated with that feeling?’ … and so on. Usually one has only to track back a few minutes or a few hours … yesterday afternoon at the most. Then one is free from both the tension and the ‘Tried and True’ cure of ‘relax’.
Speaking personally, I never relaxed in all those years of application and diligence, patience and perseverance … upon exposure to the bright light of awareness the tension always disappeared. (Richard, AF List, Gary, 28 Jan 2001)
Vineeto: You may also find the following correspondence relevant, a discovery regarding a basic seriousness which stands in the way of enjoyment and naiveté – (snipped: Richard, AF List, No. 82, 3 Jan 2006)
Chrono: Thinking on this basic seriousness led me to another layer connected to it that perhaps I hadn’t noticed before but it makes more sense now. It is this “Need to Belong”. Much of my malice and sorrow revolves around this and could be placed under this header. For example, with my partner and with many others, it feels as if I must feel bad when they feel bad or else I am not caring. It feels like there’s something very important here. I can feel the push and pull from this in all of my interactions. The relating with others is a shared malice and sorrow. If I don’t go along with this then it feels like I will be ostracized and alone. This feels like the source of my doubt in just being happy and harmless forever and feels like it is sourced in pure sorrow and loneliness. It’s like if this pull wasn’t there, then I could just enjoy life without any effort. As it’s from this direction there’s either seriousness or in the other direction which is naiveté. Now here it really feels like that to pick naiveté fully is to be completely foolish and this feeling is very strong. The pull of seriousness has all the backing of everyone I know and have ever known.
Maybe right now the only thing I can do is to keep returning to feeling good and come back to it again. Actually I just re-read my previous post and it looks like I am going in circles. It seems that this “debilitating doubt” and seriousness has come back full force. (link)
I remember ‘Vineeto’ in her first year of actualism noticed a similar pattern in her socializing – whenever ‘she’ had conversations with ‘her’ then-friends they were complaining about life and the world and looking for sympathy and confirmation. ‘Vineeto’ soon reduced and finally abandoned those ‘friendships’ because there was simply no enjoyment to be gained in their company. At times you cannot have it both ways, leaving the real world and be accepted/ applauded by its denizen.
However what Kuba said in this recent post to you (link) is also possible on some occasions. It requires that, by liking yourself and the way of life you have chosen – persistently feeling good or better and being harmless – that you decline believing their set of social standards and hierarchical values and thus decline to give them the power to doubt yourself because of it. It’s in your hands, not theirs how you choose to live your life.
Richard: It was inside the first few weeks, actually, of putting into action what was startlingly evident in the four-hour pure consciousness experience (PCE) which had finally provided the direction my otherwise following-the-herd way of living was singularly lacking (although there was a six-month incubation period between the PCE and the application thereof).
I distinctly recall informing my then-wife at the time that I had ‘done it their way’, for 34 years and to no avail, and that it was high-time I did it my way (and when she asked what way that was I said that I did not know but that it would become progressively apparent with each step I took). [Emphases added]. (Richard, AF List, No. 60g, 30 Oct 2005b).
Cheers Vineeto