Emp: Hi Vineeto,
thank you for your response! I won’t leave you on read this time. I did however have a very eventful day so I’ll keep it brief for now until everything has settled.
Hi Emp,
Thank you for your prompt reply despite your eventful day.
Emp: I was pondering today what you said about beating myself up, while also trying to feel out rumination (I’ve come to realise that rumination is a lot more than just the anxiety-ridden thought marathons I’d get up to regularly). At the same time I was quite upset and torn about a loyalty and empathy question in my personal life which I just couldn’t seem to solve without ending up in a bind. After a lot of back and forthing, the only way out seemed to be to just cut myself more slack than I’ve ever cut myself in my whole life, the longest leash I’ve ever given myself and no more self-recrimination. That was the only way I could get down deep enough into myself to get at the rift. At the same time, I’m scared I’ll just get a reply back that “well, how will you conduct yourself now that you’ve let yourself off the hook? How will you learn if there’s no 15 minutes of hate after you’ve done something bad(1)?” It feels like somehow the Thought Police will know there’s a woman walking around in Sweden not lambasting herself for her mistakes while being friends with her grotty self (quelle horreur!). Maybe it’s ridiculous but that’s the base of the emotion right now.
(1) 99% of the time, not something bad at all, but my moralistic framing makes it so in my rumination cave.
Questioning your loyalty and sense of belonging, or the demand for empathy, are both values deeply rooted in the human condition and you cannot come to a sensible clean solution balancing one against the other. Here is something ‘Vineeto’ wrote regarding ‘her’ fears abandoning the ship … perhaps you can relate –
GARY: There is also underlying this a fear, now that I am abandoning ship, casting myself overboard, so to speak. I feel like a ship adrift without a rudder, without the controls of faith, hope, belief. There is also the conditioned fear or dread of some kind of divine punishment, as I am turning away from religion and spiritual teaching.
It’s an interesting trip!
VINEETO: It is indeed an interesting trip! This fear of abandoning ship, which I remember from my own process, is the very proof that something had actually changed and I was not simply replacing one belief with another. I didn’t understand the nature of the fear at the time, yet whenever I stopped to reconsider the sensibility of my choice for Actual Freedom I knew I was better off ‘without the rudder’ of the traditional ‘Tried and Failed’.
The dread of ‘divine punishment’ was very real to me for some time – ‘what if everyone is right after all and I end up in (Eastern) hell?’ Each time one steps away from humanity’s beliefs to stand on one’s own two feet, there is this mad feeling of ‘oh dear, what have I done?’ And yet, when discovering the actual underneath the belief, the actual is so self-evidently obvious that I always thought ‘how come I haven’t seen this before, how come nobody tells you about it, how come nobody else sees this?’
The psychic world of divine and evil, with its atavistic feelings and psychic power structures, is not to be dismissed lightly. It is not a small thing we are doing, stepping out of ancient psychic history and leaving behind at least 3,500 years of recorded superstition and belief, hope for heaven and fear of hell. I encountered fears of being burnt as a witch, expelled from the tribe or starved to death – which in not so recent history were not just psychic imagined fears. These fears all seem to be woven as an ancient memory in our brain cells and are automatically triggered the moment one dares to steps out of the tribal, religious or social group one has belonged to.
Two things always helped me to overcome those fear-attacks – one was the obvious fact that feelings are not actual. Nobody is actually persecuting me or physically threatening me. The other thing is the understanding that I am deliberately and actively dismantling my very ‘self’, all of ‘who I think and feel I am’ and of course that will rock the boat, it wouldn’t be an actual change if it didn’t! Then, the journey becomes really thrilling … [Emphasis added]. (Actualism, Vineeto, AF List, Gary, 3.8.2000).
Therefore, “to just cut myself more slack” might work in the short term but, as you describe, with more fears of reprisal for being amoral (link) – because you remain within the (unliveable) moral/ ethical parameters of the human condition in your evaluation of what will happen.
It’s important to recognize that actualism is a totally different ballgame altogether; then you can slowly step out of those parameters and follow your intent and commitment to be happy and harmless. When you are felicitous and naïve and like yourself, you are simultaneously harmless (they are one and the same thing) and then, with pure intent operating, you now longer require the straight-jacket of the real-world morals and ethics because you are already more friendly, amiable, considerate and courteous than any rule-obeying feeling being can ever be.
It takes a while to work this out experientially but the longer you do it the more you see that it makes sense.
When you are not in the grip of fervent emotions, you might try out attentiveness (instead of rumination), the way Richard described it here –
Richard: To enable apperceptiveness to haply occur it is essential to allow a reflective attention – attentiveness – to one’s psychological and psychic world. It is impossible for one to intelligently observe what is going on within if one does not at the same time acknowledge the occurrence of one’s various feeling-tones with attentiveness. This is especially true with the hostile and invidious emotions and passions (those that are hateful and fearful). In order to observe one’s own fear, for instance, one must admit to the fact that one is afraid. Nor can one examine one’s own depression, for another example, without acknowledging it fully. The same is true for irritation and agitation and frustration and all those other uncomfortable emotional and passionate moods. One cannot examine something fully if one is busy denying its existence. Whatever feeling one may be having, a fascinated attention – attentiveness – freely divulges it … it is looking with discernibleness. All affective feelings are – quite simply – an hereditary occurrence, an inborn factor to be acutely aware of. No pride, no shame, nothing personal at stake … what is there, is naturally there. There is no clinging to the affectionate and desirable emotions and passions (those that are loving and trusting) and no fleeing from the hostile and invidious, either (those that are hateful and fearful). A contemplative attention views all feelings as commensurate – nothing is suppressed and nothing is expressed – as attentiveness does not play favourites. (Richard, Articles, Attentiveness Sensuousness Apperceptiveness).
I always liked the last sentence – “attentiveness does not play favourites”. Normally as a feeling being everything experienced is valued either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or somewhere in-between, hence embraced or rejected. When deliberately nothing is at stake but a fascination for non-passionate reflective exploration, it is much easier to discover a pattern, a belief, a system and find out how the mind works and how ‘I’ tick.
Emp: I also took it upon myself to ponder why “we have all the time in the universe” doesn’t quite click for me and while it was just a brief glimpse. I think I might have started to understand what it actually means… and I tried ramping up my intent afterwards and I no longer felt squeezed between a rock and a hard place. I’ll need longer glimpses before I consider this properly experienced though. (link)
Having “all the time in the universe” only applies in actuality – in the real world time is ‘self’-centric, limited and boxed in by what you feel you need/ want to achieve before the sun sets or ‘time is up’, and the more achievements, whatever they are, you can squeeze into the hours of the day the ‘better’ a person you, and others, consider you to be. The mistake many actualists make is that they deem this schedule of achievements and boxes to tick to also apply to the actualism method – it does not.
It’s really the contrary – you allow actuality to become apparent (actuality being already actually existing and perfect) via sensuosity, enjoyment and appreciation of being here in this moment of being alive.
Cheers Vineeto