Enjoying with senses vs feelings

2 days ago, I got up in the morning and went to the bathroom, There was very little light, so I was trying to establish a connection and intimacy with things around me. I saw the door, the walls and them my legs – and for 2 seconds, I got a sense of fear, that I would “lose myself”. So I pulled back right away and it passed in about 20 seconds. But i was kinda feeling happy that something different like that had happened :slight_smile:

Could this have been a real phenomenon or was it just imagination ?

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:smiley: well it depends what you mean by real or imagination.

You certainly experienced fear, just like any other time you experienced fear. The ultimate fact that the fear isn’t actual doesn’t change that it feels and is experienced as real.

Whether you actually were about to “lose yourself” or not - I couldn’t say! But it seems like a positive sign that you’re exploring the boundaries of ‘self’. You are very likely (if not certainly) going to come up against fear many times. I think a lot of it is just getting used to it. You get comfortable with a certain level of enjoyment or purity or relative lack of control … then you see the next level and at first it is scary, so you pull back. But the draw continues, you keep looking and now instead of being afraid you see a thrilling aspect to it. You allow yourself to go further and experience that thrill while doing so … then you start to experientially see that it is safe, it becomes the new normal, and then you see the next level … … etc etc !

Be that as it may , a PCE and an EE can and do happen spontaneously, with no prior ‘warning’ or ‘upleveling’ required beforehand. Ultimately it’s just about allowing it to happen…

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Another question!

If i keep my attention on my senses ( like fingers, eyes, ears, touch, etc.)
and enjoy the sensations of these senses, for example: – enjoying : holding the tooth brush,
walking to the kitchen, sitting in a chair, breathing, etc, etc-- as much as I can
when i remember to pay attention to these senses randomly, would that be a part of eaatmoba ?

And what if I can not do it when engaged in looking at media or
doing some other cognitive work, that does not allow my attention to
be on my senses? How do i eaatmoba then ?

And also is Attentiveness/Sensuousness , suppose to lead to eaatmoba ?
if so then i would think that
Attentiveness/Sensuousness is another tool for bringing about eaatmoba ! :appreciation: !

Yes

By stopping watching the media
:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
More seriously, the so called ccgnitive tasks are, of course, comparatively more difficult to sustain eaatmoba. That is why it is advisable to dedicate specific times to enjoy and appreciate.

Yes

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Also one thing to keep firmly in mind is that EAATMOBA while outside of a PCE is essentially done via feelings, not via the senses per se.

When being sensuous, it is the affective feeling-enjoyment of the senses that is what the enjoyment that is happening is.

When a cognitive engagement with something else is what is happening … then it can be, for example, the affective feeling-enjoyment of doing that task that is the enjoyment (it is fun to engage cognition - the brain ‘likes’ to think just like the eyes ‘like’ to see).

But underlying the feeling-enjoyment of what is happening , it can simply be being in a good mood while doing these things - so if the cognitive task isn’t fun (like some boring work), you don’t need to suffer… rather the idea is you can still be in a good mood while doing said boring work.

The commonality of all these is that the enjoyment is done via feeling said enjoyment :smile:.

While having a PCE then you are those very senses and experience is intrinsically enjoyable - any feeling-enjoyment becomes redundant. But that is something to see for yourself when such a PCE is happening.

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This makes it a little harder to wrap my head around!

But thinking it over, maybe it is just saying the same thing in a different way.
Are you saying that:
“I” enjoy the senses/sensate via feelings as a feeling being; the senses don’t enjoy “themselves” unless in a PCE … is that correct ?

BTW, Claudiu, hurry up and get Actually Freed, because if you can come up with these answers now,
who knows what you will be able to do when Actually Freed( i can feel that is going to happen any day now)!:slight_smile:

Another thing, would it be safe to say that the Universe’s matter turned into consciousness, and
human consciousness is not perceiving matter “correctly”, so via Actual Freedom we are trying to
see matter for “what it actually is” – so matter is “what matters”, not our interpretations of matter!

Matter > Consciousness > Matter ( consciousness becoming aware that is seeing matter)

… so Matter is seeing Matter , maybe ? :slight_smile:

… i.e. Universe experiencing itself ?

Forgive my over philosophizing please.

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I would not recommend this approach, it seems to make sense on the surface… In the PCE I am the senses so why not focus on enjoying the senses when normal.

The problem is that ‘I’ can only experience ‘myself’ affectively so to ‘focus on the senses’ when normal is to begin to split yourself in 2. This has been tried before by others and seems to lead to not much success at the least and dissociation/weird states at the most.

From reading your post it appears to me that you are not already feeling good and enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive when you attempt to ‘focus on the senses’. You might be feeling somewhat neutral/bland/bad?

What I find is that when I am feeling good, great, excellent etc then attention naturally falls to the senses, it happens because you are having a blast being alive and you can’t help but begin to notice this wonderful world of the senses opening up to you.

So what I am trying to say is that sensuosity becomes more and more available as a result of feeling good, aiming to reverse the process and use ‘paying attention to the senses’ as a vehicle to get to feeling good does not appear to work well in practice.

Although I will say it is for each person to work out what works and does not, my recommendation would be to look out for signs of splitting yourself in 2 or repressing feelings if you do attempt to ‘focus on the senses’ whilst not already feeling good.

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I feel like this is a very “special” part of actualism: repeatedly seeing that there’s simply no way around it, no way to “cheat” or avoid the fact that the way the actualism method works is by basically always being in a good mood :smile:.

I think part of why it happens, from how it happened for me, is that it is actually really obvious when I’m not in a good mood or haven’t been in a generally good mood. And not being in a good mood happens so often at first, and so easily (I guess it’s how most people live their lives?) that it seems impossible to always be in a good mood. So if it’s impossible then therefore the method must be something “else”… there must be some way to enjoy without enjoying (lol). So then I spend literally all my time and effort doing anything but enjoying … trying to find that way to “succeed in actualism” but without actually enjoying. Because to get from here (of impossible to always be in a good mood) to there (always being in a good mood) it would require changing ‘me’… and vastly so.

But the good news is it’s not binary, it’s incremental, and I can always (re-)start where I’m at!

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Yes haha I was thinking exactly the same thing this morning when contemplating @FrankN’s post.

I can see this in myself, this feeling that I am somehow so special that whatever Richard (the guy with most experience regarding actual freedom) advises somehow doesn’t quite apply to me, ‘I am a special case’ and can somehow cheat around and make it happen ‘my’ way, which as you say translates into ‘I’ do not want to change.

After-all the best way to delay something is to make it unnecessarily complicated!

Something to this tune was asked earlier :

RICK: Should I try and focus on what my senses are experiencing (i.e. paying attention to colours, noises, smells, textures, and such) and ignore feelings?

RICHARD: As what you are asking is, in effect, whether a PCE can be induced by focussing on sensate experience with a bored, nervous, scared, regretful, and etcetera, attentiveness the answer is: no.

RICK: Thus, I wonder that maybe I should switch my focus from paying attention to my internal state of affairs when asking myself how I’m experiencing this moment of being alive, to exclusively focusing on what is happening externally (sensately).

RICHARD: As what you are wondering is, in effect, whether apperception (unmediated perception) can be brought about by focussing on sensate experience with a bored, nervous, scared, regretful, and etcetera, attentiveness your wonder is entirely misplaced.

RICK: Any thoughts on that approach?

RICHARD: Just this: the more one enjoys and appreciates simply being alive – to the point of excellence being the norm – the greater the likelihood of a PCE happening … a bored, nervous, scared, regretful, and etcetera, person has no chance whatsoever of allowing the magical event, which indubitably shows where everyone has being going awry, to occur.

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I was just about to quote part of that same quotation, @Shashank!:

by thus deactivating both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ feelings, and therefore activating the felicitous/ innocuous feelings (happiness, delight, joie de vivre, bonhomie and so on), then with this freed-up affective energy maximised, in conjunction with sensuousness (delectation, enjoyment, appreciation, relish, zest, gusto and so on), the ensuing sense of amazement, marvel and wonder can result in apperceptiveness (unmediated perception).

Just since increasing felicitous feelings, sensuality and attentiveness feed back to each other, I quickly responded assuming that @FrankN was not asking about using the senses in order to then enjoy and appreciate, but as part of that feedback that should always begin by minimizing good and bad feelings and releasing that affective energy.

Now that I read more carefully, it is possible that he was indeed asking about it. If that’s the case, @FrankN, better pay attention to what others have answered and to Richard’s words than to my quick and concise answers.

But as you may find on the forum that, indeed, I tend to use that technique (paying attention to the senses as an entry point to decrease the good and bad feelings and to increase the felicitous feeling), it is good to clarify that my feedback/inertia between felicitous feelings-attentiveness-sensuousness is quite strong and relatively constant, and that my attention to the senses functions more as a reminiscence tool of the many EEs and PCEs I have had.

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@Kub933 and Claudiu, I really appreciate your wonderful feedback, and you maybe right that I did not feel good and was trying to use the senses to feel better; but as Claudiu says, it is incremental process.

However, how would you interpret what Richard says below with regards to “live as your senses”:
RICHARD: Put it this way: do you have the intent to spend the remainder of your life on this verdant planet having malice and sorrow as a backdrop to your every waking moment? Which means that, although you may have shorter or longer periods of being carefree and considerate, greater or lesser moments of gaiety and benevolence, bigger or smaller interludes of being blithesome and benign and so on, do you have the intent to retain and maintain the current base-line of your day-to-day life (which is the fall-back position of animosity and anguish that requires the time-honoured coping methods to keep your head above water) until the day that you die? If your answer is ‘YES’ then you do not have pure intent, you are not pursuing happiness and harmlessness and you will not have a problem with ‘possessiveness’ about peace-on-earth.

If your answer is ‘NO’ then you are already somewhat pursuing peace-on-earth, with at least a trace of pure intent, and the ‘problem’ of automatically trying to ‘possess’ freedom when it occurs will inevitably arise as you have success after success at inducing pure consciousness experiences (PCE’s). The name of the game is to be able to ‘live as your senses’ more and more and for longer and longer periods (and to want this is to pursue it) and to the degree you do not make the instinctual ‘grab’ for ownership of these moments is the degree to which these moments will be prolonged … and these moments are where you learn what it is to be free by direct experience instead of reading about it.
Honesty with oneself is paramount – a dishonest approach will produce a dishonest result – and unless one is scrupulously candid one is in danger of being swept up in the Glamour and Glory and Glitz of the ‘Enlightened State’ and suffer the delusion that one is god on earth (an embodiment of the ‘supreme intelligence’ that is beyond time and space and form) … replete with that spurious ‘Peace That Passeth All Understanding’.
It is possible.

He’s referring to having PCEs - as in having longer and longer PCEs more and more often.

He is not referring to trying to ‘be’ the senses while not in a PCE – it’s impossible to do and will worst-case result in an ASC. This is because ‘I’ the feeling-being am not the senses, and nothing ‘I’ ever do can change that… it’s just the nature of ‘me’, ‘I’ am forever locked out of actuality / of being the senses. But what ‘you’ (feeling-being ‘Frank’) can do is get out of the way and allow an experience of “the actual flesh-and-blood body called Frank experiencing himself as the senses”, to happen :slight_smile: .

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Thank you Cluadiu for a wonderful and prompt answer as always.

I have read a lot of the stuff that Richard has said about feeling good : “remember the last time you felt good and get back to that” , but at the same time it says that I can not “will myself” to feel good, so, there lies the dilemma-- do I have to do something to feel good, or how will feel good happen by itself ?

Is this: via feeling said enjoyment, means, via feeling being enjoyment ?

I can add another voice of support of this ‘vibe-first’ rather than ‘living as the senses first’ approach to actualism, as I for a long time was attempting to become free by just paying attention to the senses but it had a persistent dullness because it was always ‘I’ the identity experiencing the senses - and thus maintaining the dull filter of reality. There was also very little or no progress for a long time during this period.

Additionally, I remember my biggest takeaway from visiting Richard & Vineeto was, ‘Vibes first!’ As in, pay attention to what my vibe is, make the changes there, and everything good comes from that. So you’re welcome to borrow that ‘motto’ as a good reminder :slight_smile:

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thank you very very very much, henryyyyyyyy !

Putting it like you did, resonates much more clearly with me and I can take it to heart, and make it my own, rather than “accepting” it intellectually ( forced on me by command ) :slight_smile:

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Indeed, follow the flow-chart :slight_smile: Actualism flow diagram - #155 by claudiu

You were feeling good before… you remember this feeling good before… you trace back to see when exactly that feeling good stopped happening … then you see what it is that caused the feeling good to stop happening… then you “see the silliness” of letting that take away from feeling good — and once you successfully “see the silliness”, you are automatically back to feeling good!

It really does work this way in practice. There is no hidden meaning behind the words, or anything like that. This is a literal description of how it works!

So the task for you is to try these steps, and if it works great, and if not then if you can identify which of the steps in particular is not working then someone may be able to help in more detail. I know if it were me, the issue would probably be that I hadn’t even tried doing the steps… it took me a few years to start doing it consistently lol.

Hmm I didn’t quite understand your re-phrasing of it. But it’s just a grammatical thing. To re-phrase it more clearly I would say:

The commonality of all these is that the way the enjoyment is ‘done’ or ‘accomplished’ is by feeling the enjoyment.

It’s just emphasising that the enjoyment is a feeling, as in an affective thing (which can be an emotion/feeling or a mood).

I like Henry’s way of putting it - “Vibes first!” :smiley: .

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I wish “I” could hack this on my brain(s)/ i.e my thoughts, henryyyyyyyyy !