Felix's Diary

[claudiu]

Hi Felix,

@Felix

I’m starting to feel good more and more often. Right now I’m experiencing the clarity and coziness and delight of feeling good - total safety and fun at the same time. Where is the anxious and stressed state I’m so familiar with? And did I take a drug? (no )

That is truly wonderful news!

Just a few things to add to Vineeto’s excellent message.

First I would take this opportunity to advise you to explicitly direct your attention to appreciating what is happening for you right now. As I wrote to Kuba recently:

@claudiu

I am particularly drawing focus on the “appreciating the enjoyment” aspect because in my experience, in past times, when I would be feeling good, I would not think much of it. And when feeling bad I would feel very bad. At some point when I was feeling good I thought to actually compare the quality of it with feeling bad, and I came to appreciate how immensely better even a basic feeling good was. This appreciation of it did marvels in helping me to cement it and increase it further, it paved the way for higher and more consistent levels of feeling great, excellent, etc.

I would heartily recommend all the recent posts surrounding this topic of appreciation, starting from James' Journal - #398 by Vineeto and onward, as this can really propel you forward once you are already at this very worthy stage of “experiencing the clarity and coziness and delight of feeling good”.

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The other main thing I wanted to draw your attention to is the matter of will, intention, and the role this plays in actualism, because it is a very important one.

What I have found, and the further I go down the path the more I find it is true, a fact, is that I am my feelings and my feelings are me. Any way that I feel about anything, it ultimately is up to me, it is my deep-down choice as to how to feel. The act of feeling the feeling is equivalent to me wanting to feel that feeling. How could it be any other way? As I am those feelings, it is not possible to feel something I do not, deep-down, want to feel.

You wrote:

@Felix

I know I used to write a lot about “actively enjoying” etc but what I was really trying to do back then was to go over the self….like trying to override my real desires and feelings and instincts and resentment for being alive by brute force. It’s not the way. You can’t pretend that the self is not there, and then abuse it or suppress it or manipulate it to get some outcome.

What you have found out is that you cannot “override [your] real desires and feelings and instincts”. This is completely correct. The missing piece is that the ‘you’ that is trying to override those “desires and feelings and instincts” is not all of ‘you’. It is only a very small, essentially cognitive “ego” piece that is sitting atop a mountain that is the entirety of ‘you’, which is affective, emotional, and psychic^[1] in nature.

So how can it be your choice how to feel if you cannot control how you feel? The key is that you are those “real desires and feelings and instincts” that you were trying to override. The key to being able to redirect that energy more and more into feeling good, is seeing that this is the case. This is where sincerity comes into play – it comes down to allowing yourself to see precisely why you have those desires, feelings, and instincts in the first place. Once you see the actual reason you feel that way, then you will be able to have a conscious say in the matter.

I think of it as bringing what is subconscious up towards the conscious. This can often be rocky and tumultuous because we all have an ideal of how we want to be, which does not match how we actually are – the social conditioning has evolved specifically to suppress and redirect those malicious and sorrowful impulses so we can be relatively well-functioning members of society. Thus there is an inherent conflict in them, and allowing yourself to see what appears to be the ugly belly of the beast that ‘you’ (and ‘I’ and all feeling-beings) actually are, can be challenging. But the delightful thing, what really allows you to do this safely, guided by pure intent, is that since those deep-down desires are you… you actually have a choice in the matter! Once you allow yourself to see it, then you can allow yourself to choose feeling good instead.

This may seem too abstract, so I’ll leave you to ask yourself this question: as you are feeling good now, do you want to be feeling good? And if you really didn’t want to be feeling good, do you think you would be?

@Felix

The self needs to be treated with care, graciously and gently like you’d treat a little kid almost. It will cling so hard to what it thinks it wants with a powerful grip, and investigating is a way of gently prying it’s toys away from its little hands.

I would re-consider this in light of the above, seeing that this “self” that you have talked about in the third-person and referred to as “it”, is actually the you, the Felix that is reading these words right now. You can thus be gentle with yourself, be ok with the fact that you like these “toys” and are holding onto them with a “powerful grip”, and then you can begin to gently investigate just what it is you actually have to gain by keeping these toys around, and what you fear you might lose if you don’t.

@Felix

It’s a kind of frequency that you tap into, but not by force, like I always wanted to. It’s a real catch 22 that wanting actual freedom too badly will really, really not work.

I would counter and say that not wanting it enough is what will really, really not work. The key is to want it in a sincere, aka aligned way – with both the upper egoic pieces of you and the deeper soulful pieces all wanting it. You have seen just part of you wanting it doesn’t work – excellent! Now you can proceed with getting all of you on board, bit by bit, starting from where you are at and taking things one at a time.

The more success you have, the more you feel good, the more you feel good the more you can appreciate how good feeling good is, the more you appreciate how good feeling good is the more you want to feel good, which then fuels your intent and allows you to go further and further.

What a blast it all is!

With cheers & whole-hearted encouragement,
Claudiu

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1. (as in: ‘of the psyche’) ↩︎