It has been a while since I’ve written here and it’s mainly because I had fallen back to feeling bad. Or more specifically it’s because I’ve had a lot of trouble sleeping/have been sleep deprived and have, in the last couple of weeks, got back to getting all my rest and feeling good.
Right now it feels like so long ago that I can’t even remember all the details, but I will comment that it relates to my “OCD” way of being (I am only calling it that because I don’t have another word). It morphs and latches onto various things in order to gain certainty. Maybe the instinctual urgency way of being as mentioned above. I’m inclined to even say that it is bordering on an altered state of consciousness. I can say though that it started with the whole stonewalling issue with my partner. And the primary feeling it engendered in me was feeling “trapped”. I felt that I had to solve the issue or else we won’t be able to enjoy our time together. Except as time went by and I didn’t do anything, it was as if the issue solved itself. There was no real issue and I found that it again had to do with the Good/Bad dichotomy. There had been a dream (self-centric) functioning that only if my partner behaved or acted a certain way then there could be peace and harmony between us (something along those lines). Now any time I note that I am bothered in this way then I know that I have a “good” belief functioning in the background. The question then was, was it worth holding onto that (good) dream if it meant feeling miserable and simultaneously disregarding my partner as a full person on her own (being but an accessory to ‘my’ dream)? I could not have the one without the other. And I got my genuine answer of ‘no the good is not worth the bad’. Only then did that state of being release its grip.
Another thing which seems to be at the heart of that instinctual urgency is disregarding the fact of ‘I am my feelings and my feelings are me’. One thing that’s very clear to me is how important being genuine and honest is. Otherwise nothing happens. If I’m going in circles, it’s because I’m not being genuine and honest. I can only get to being my feelings with full honesty. Only then I’m not fighting against myself.
But I had seen these things before so why do I keep falling back? Maybe attentiveness had become lax. How can feeling good become a solid foundation? Or rather how can I genuinely commit to feeling good forever? All of this does come under one header and I can’t believe how often this theme comes up, but it’s resentment. I was reading this interesting correspondence:
RESPONDENT: Vineeto: ‘Now it seems important to identify the more subtle feelings, moods and affections that indicate ‘me’ coming to the foreground. And they are more the ‘good’ feelings and the ‘no-feelings’ – as I called them once – that I need to be aware of.’
(V Actual Freedom Mailing List Correspondence Alan 4).
It seems that I rarely get strong obvious feelings such as anger, most of my time is spent with subtle lacklustre feelings. The actualism method seems to be much harder to get working during such times. By ‘harder’ I mean I’m left feeling happy and harmless far less often. With the obvious feelings, it seems like it is so easy: this person did this/that and I reacted like this… But with these subtle dull feelings, the cause is often a thought or sequence of thoughts, which I think are harder to trace-back in memory, especially when in the grip of these feelings. The ‘no-feelings’ that Vineeto talks about in that quote seem to be the predominant ones for me. Do you think it is practically harder to identify, ‘lock-on’ and be attentive to the neutral feelings? By the way, as I write this I noticed – as you did previously – a hilarious subtle background feeling/ attitude of ‘tell me how to get this to work because it doesn’t work for me at all ever and never can or will’. Silly ‘me’. I bet the days of that attitude are numbered.
VINEETO: The phrase I would use now, in hindsight, for those ‘no-feelings’ of lack-lustre and listlessness is resentment of being here. Within the human condition there is a basic resentment of not wanting to be here, wanting to be somewhere else, waiting for something else to happen than what is happening now, as a basic attitude to life, which is then reinforced by the various religious and spiritual conditioning that life on earth is essentially suffering and that the real life will only happen for the spirit after you die.
This resentment to being here, as this body, in the world-as-it-is with people-as-they-are, was what was responsible for my dull feelings, no-feelings, my listlessness, my boredom, my waiting for something else to happen, in short, it had permeated almost all experience of life in that it had cast a dulling shade over everything I experienced.
The way to deal with resentment in the actualism method is the same way you deal with all other feelings that interfere with you being happy and harmless – when paying attention to how you experience this moment of being alive, you notice it, then label it which helps you realise that it would be silly to carry on with it when you can instead enjoy being alive. With a steady increase in attentiveness the shift of resenting being here to appreciating being here becomes progressively easier until you finally kick the insidious habit of resentment altogether and delight in being alive for the simple reason that you are alive.
As I walked along with those words, I experienced it in myself. Any dreaming or desiring to being away in some other place and some other time is an expression of the resentment of being alive. The reason that the good/bad feelings are being supported is because those dreams sit atop this foundation of resentment. I can see it very clearly now. I have noted it before but I did not realize how deep it goes. It is reinforced by everyone. Now I can see it more easily in its occurrence. With the declining of this resentment and saying that yes to being alive at this moment, my only interest is in experiencing things as they actually are. I know that this has been the issue because the moment I noticed it and decided to want to be here, the other issues were as if they didn’t exist and I felt good.