Hello Emp,
I’d like to start our conversation with something you said in your convivium report –
Emp: Secondly, what I was saying to Geoffrey on the first day, that gave rise to sincerity, all started with mentioning how I’d messaged Vineeto privately two years ago and she’d challenged me back and like the coward I am I ran for the hills. Saying this untied a knot of fairly large proportions and then the rest of that house of cards came down. I know Vineeto doesn’t need an apology but still… I’m a massive coward. (link)
There is indeed no apology needed – I realized I had been bombarding you with probing questions before we were even properly acquainted, and this was certainly not the most gentle approach. And sometimes it’s just not the right time, but perhaps now it is?
If you allow me, I would like to comment on some of what you reported after you went back home –
Emp: On Monday I was getting a bit antsy though. I needed to be able to get somewhere at home. The weather felt oppressive (rainy and cold, and nature seemed to be dead and barren compared to Algarve). I told my colleagues I’d work from home and with my hours a bit skewed, and went out for a walk. I did think that maybe I was being a bit insane about the whole thing, and perhaps also a bit avoidant (I do tend to have this problem) but it seemed to me that proving to myself that I could do it at home had to be my priority above all else, and I had the margins at work to be flexible.
As I was walking around I started noticing that plants that had seemed dead to me started popping out when I took the time to relax and let things happen. I eventually found myself at a cliffside (with proper fencing!) looking out over the sea and the ships coming in and noticing that sweetness coming in from all sides. I could do it, even when it was raining! I played around with Gemini and plants again but had to keep an eye on other people wondering why the heck I was jumping around the cliffs looking at moss. There’s a lot of social identity there still and I need to whittle that part down.
What I notice you seem to be a very sensuous, vivacious and passionate person but with a strong habit to put yourself down for everything you observe going on in yourself, even when it’s towards freeing yourself (“a bit insane”, “a lot of social identity”). I can understand it well because ‘Vineeto’ oft-times had similar sentiments but it is very counterproductive – ‘you’ can only be “the solution” (as well as the problem) when you are a friend to yourself, when ‘I’ become an ally in this adventure of a lifetime to undo ‘myself’. So when you talk about harmlessness, that needs to include yourself, being harmless with yourself. When you have a feeling attack – and they are bound to happen – sitting on your hands includes not beating yourself up.
It’s this very beating up which feeds negative affective energy and increases the problem, whatever it is – those are the simple mechanics of how feelings (i.e. how ‘you’) operate. Not feeding them, not going in any direction while they rage is the quickest way to calm down.
Emp: I started feeling my motivation ramping up. I really wanted this. I wanted what I’d experienced in Algarve like I’d never wanted anything before. I did start noticing how I was throwing myself indiscriminately at it like a rabid pit bull though. Whenever I thought of slowing down I could just hear myself going “turn down for WHAT!” and then I kept at it. (…) I’ve spent so many years being more or less entirely dissociated that getting out of it so cleanly, and then spending close to a week so close to the actual, was bound to give me some kind of whiplash getting back.
It’s wonderful, isn’t it, to know exactly what you want. But then ‘I’ take charge and use this very wonderful aim to prove that it’s not possible by “throwing myself indiscriminately at it like a rabid pit bull”. It’s one of ‘my’, the identity’s strategies to psychologically/ psychically survive – and when you see that, really see that, you will stop doing that to yourself, become calm (realizing you have “all the time in the universe”) and experientially move towards what you want like you “never wanted anything before”.
There will be backlashes and fear attacks, an actual freedom is against the instinctually-programmed nature of your being. But there is also, deep down, a secret yearning for oblivion, for an end to this constant fighting defending the status quo, to be the ever-alert guardian of the secret that you are being “a fraud and a parasite” (link). There is nothing to attain, to create, the very end of the conflict allows ‘me’ to grow thinner and thinner (as you found out in the quote below) –
Emp: I looked at the forum and saw hunterad’s response in the convivium thread and something clicked in me. I went and got my heated blanket and snuggled up underneath it, softened my approach entirely and suddenly everything that had been bothering me just melted away. I could once again feel that undercurrent of sweetness that had suffused the entire convivium week, and this time without working myself into a pretzel just to get a whiff of it. I just lay in my bed, listening to the wind blowing things around outside and feeling calm for the first time in days.
The very confirmation that you don’t have to fight to experience actuality, the “undercurrent of sweetness” – it is already always existing.
Emp: And finally, I need to soften my approach. I’ve had a couple of really rocky days when I’ve tried to force things while pretending I wasn’t forcing things. (…) There’s a large part of me that wants to fail, because this is scary. It went so fast that I knew I could do it, and I could do it right away. I’ve tried to channel that part of me that wants to sabotage this as some kind of reckless abandon but I’m not sure it works. I even wrote, as one of my first notes to myself, that ‘I’ grow and stay alive in the friction, in the desperation and in the phugoid oscillations I keep creating for myself. If I succeed I’m gone and no longer needed, and that still frightens me. I can see, whenever I get closer to the sweetness and actuality, that I’m not needed, but I need to do this with more situations and also not working so hard for it, almost driving myself silly in the process. (link)
This is very perspicacious and you have a wonderful way of expressing it (I had to look up what you are creating for yourself 
). “Working so hard for it” is certainly counterproductive and a tricky way of ‘you’, the identity taking and maintaining control –
Richard: I might add, though, that naïveté does away with all that ‘heavy lifting’ you spoke of in an earlier e-mail. Viz.:
• [Respondent]: ‘From what I can glean so far, virtual freedom is a period of ‘heavy lifting’. (‘Introduction’; Friday, 27 July 2003).
Where you have gleaned this diaphoretic impression from has got me stumped … here is but one of the many ways I describe the actualism practice: (…)
Or even more specifically to the point of your ‘heavy lifting’ comment:• [Co-Respondent]: ‘If it is the experiencer that makes efforts to be aware and stay aware, the centre is strengthened, not dissolved, right?
• [Richard]: ‘Since when has naiveté been sudorific? (Richard, List B, No 12q, 5 Jan 2003).
In short: if it be not either easy (effortless) or fun (enjoyable) then there is something to look at until it is again. (Richard, AF List, No. 46, 9 Aug 2003).
Emp: PS. I also had a bit of a chuckle at myself; I’ve had some kind of experience every day now, of the sweetness, seeing glimpses of the actual, finding my way back to the golden clew. Everything has taken on a glittering quality even in my day-to-day living and here I am, still beating myself up over Not Doing Enough. (link)
Ah, that is great when you can see the humour and silliness of “beating myself up over Not Doing Enough”. It’s only a matter of the bad habit of beating yourself up but that can be fixed with friendly patience and perseverance.
All the best with lots of enjoyment and appreciation, and the sweetness of pure intent.
Cheers Vineeto