Felix: Thanks for the encouragement!
I should add that when I talk about this working “better” than virtual freedom, what I’m discovering is that my moment to moment experience in daily life is very much plagued by feelings, just ones that I’ve come to expect or see as normal or not able to be moved.
So the sitting and observing is like an acute practice that allows you to see things that when you’re busy or distracted, are easy to be missed.
After last night and went back to my virtual freedom practice of asking HAIETMOBA, I was surprised just how much existential angst, anxiety and resentment I found.
Hi Felix,
When you have time to contemplate while feeling good I suggest tackling resentment first. It is, with determination to be happy, the easiest of those three major obstacles and free up a lot of tied-up energy to direct to the felicitous feelings. Also, it does rather interfere with being friends with yourself. 
Felix: It seems my Achilles heel or a habit has been to want to “override” the whole process by aiming to feel good in an ambitious way, whilst trying to push down or control the seemingly malevolent/ perverse feeling being that is scuppering my efforts. Quite cunning eh.
Well, you found yourself out – one cunning trick disarmed now that you know about it. You’ll discover more – it’s the nature of ‘me’ to hide behind the most noble causes, and especially pretend-actualist causes, I noticed. But whenever you ask yourself if this or that strategy is really on your, the actual body’s side, you’ll find that it is not, even if the cover story pretends to be. Anything that is sudorific, anything that creates stress or anxiety can never be on your side.
Felix: In fact I am not sure my diary accurately reflects just how much anxiety and angst I have experienced in the last couple of years. My investigations are now taking me into these places, which before I could not enter easily or which did not seem possible to enter and which I distracted myself in whatever way I could.
This is natural, you have to peel the layers one by one, remove the ‘outer’ obstacles first and then get to the layers underneath. Don’t forget to pat yourself on the back for every discovery you make, and then act on. This means stop giving yourself a hard time (merely a bad habit now that you have seen through it) so to be able to enjoy and appreciate.
Felix: Instrumental to this was reading Richard’s writings about fear, specifically that which comes with realisation of being “a contingent being”.
RICHARD: Fear – existential angst at finding oneself to be the contingent ‘being’ one always suspected oneself to be – is both the barrier and the way to freedom. Always included in fear is a thrilling aspect, and by focussing upon this and not fear itself, an energy gathers momentum which does the trick for one (thrilling as in an exciting sensation through the body, stirring, stimulating, electrifying, rousing, moving, gripping, hair-raising, riveting, joyful, pleasing, throbbing, trembling, tremulous, quivering, shivering, fluttering, shuddering and vibrating).
‘I’ cannot set ‘myself’ free … but ‘I’ can set in motion a process that will lead to ‘my’ eventual demise. (Richard, List B, No. 12a, 18 July 1998).
Felix: I have taken this as inspiration to not be so easily stopped by the psychic electric fence which I have been stopped by for quite some time now. A fence built of my own deep fears and angst about actualism and my success with it, my life in general and how it rates, being alone, being scared of how I feel, anxious about how I look etc etc.
You probably read what I had written to JesusCarlos (link) as I had used the above quote there. I like your ‘electric fence’ analogy. Here is a quote which should give you comfort, if you understand it right in its context –
RICHARD: … I do remember that discussion well for it spells-out that which I had been wanting to have explicitly set down in words for a long time (the identity inhabiting this body all those years ago had looked in vain for anything detailed in that manner) because it pertains to matters which were the critical factor in the turning-point experiences on some uninhabited islands off the north-eastern seaboard of this country in 1985 … to wit: the existential angst of discovering that one is nothing but a contingent ‘being’ and that one will cease to ‘be’ unless the redemptive straw, of several doomsday straws, be grasped. (Richard, AF List, No. 82, 27 April 2005).
The context being that Richard describes his own experience in the process of extracting himself from enlightenment to find the actual freedom he had experience in his PCEs. The comforting part is that now we know for certain what is at the other end of this the existential angst and that there is a Direct Route which is a far easier route to an actual freedom. It still needs gutsy pioneers though.
Felix: On top of that, fears about the actual world itself and knowing intellectually that “no one exists” etc – I’ve made myself sick on those sorts of projections.
On top of that, resentment about actualism itself – jealousy about how it was so easy/ automatic for Richard, resentment for how difficult it’s been, resentment for having heard about actualism in the first place in some case and how this information has changed my life.
You do indeed give yourself a hard time, or have done so in the past. This resentment does fall under the category of anger, you know? Your jealousy is entirely unfounded because Richard did the hardest journey of all without precedence, and it often took perseverance before (link) and after (link) discovering an actual freedom. Let the facts speak for themselves so that you can recognize the silliness of holding on to this particular resentment. (Btw, Richard did not “experience himself of having the mental age of about 14 year old”, he experienced himself of having the existential age of about 14 years old, due to his ongoing naiveté). (link)
Felix: Confronting these sorts of feelings is very scary at times. There is indeed dread, foreboding and all of that. Having these feelings and then also wanting to become actually free so bad, really put me between a rock and a hard place as Kuba put it.
I was trying to feel good without really acknowledging all these feelings of “wrongness” in the way. I was dissociated from those feelings, seeing them as immutable, not my fault, and being very much a victim of them.
That is quite dangerous I think, if actualism becomes a fight against the feelings themselves. I’ve held on despite getting thrashed around considerably, firstly because I’m determined and secondly because there are others like yourself who have done this and I trust that it does work. I’m writing about my mistakes so others can sidestep them.
Here you are seeing through another trick of ‘me’ – the scary feelings are labelled feelings of “wrongness”, i.e. you are ‘bad’ to even have them, let alone feel them, and then you have to suppress them to hide them – perfect way for ‘me’ to avoid change. The result is that you use the cover of ‘your’, the identity’s, idea of actualism to fight yourself and your feelings – to maintain the status quo (anxiety).
Felix: In retrospect it can seem quite easy to say – “of course you shouldn’t feel anxiety or depression or burnout as an actualist; the point is to feel good!”. But I think that ‘take’ underestimates the complexity of the human psyche and what it can cunningly obscure and perpetuate.
Even in retrospect ‘you’ still dictate the same course – “you shouldn’t feel anxiety …”. This clearly contradicts the first principle, so to speak – be a friend to yourself. Any ‘should’ is a flashing alarm sign that you wandered off the wide and wondrous path.
Here feeling being ‘Vineeto’ wrote about dealing with ‘her’ fear in 1999 –
Vineeto: Here is a report on how I have understood and tackled fear:
- I collected as much information about the actual world as I could get to strengthen my intent. This included reading the journals, talking to Peter and Richard, making use of my intelligence, gathering facts instead of believing people and having a peak-experience with first-hand experience of the actual world. Gathering facts gave me confidence and surety about the journey.
- I was deepening my understanding that it was ‘I’ that stood in the road of experiencing the freshness, purity, aliveness and perfection of the actual world and that ‘I’ have to disappear in order for the actual world to be permanently apparent. This included the understanding that ‘I’ am made of nothing but a bundle of instincts, beliefs, imaginations, feelings and social conditioning – the Human Condition. From that understanding it was obvious that fear was ‘par for the course’ – as I wrote to Irene: ‘Fear in the face of impending death is what potatoes are for a potato-soup, its very ingredients. There is no soup without potatoes, there is no death without fear.’
- The important thing about fear is not to object to it. Now, that is easier said than done – nobody wants to feel fear. Yet the very act of objecting to fear makes it bigger and therefore makes it impossible to look at the underlying issue. Seeing fear as part of the Human Condition, the disease that everyone is inflicted with, helped to reduce my objection.
- My allies were my understanding and my intent. So whenever fear arose I focused on my intent to determine the direction of my goal – freedom and peace-on-earth – and then I would go ahead with the investigation into the underlying causes of that particular fear.
- It was always good to first sort out the facts from the feelings, to look at the situation and make sure that there was no actual physical danger.
- That made it clear that the remainder of the fear was psychological, i.e. fear of losing my friends, my work, my respectability, losing the ground I was standing on, not wanting to change, not wanting to ‘die’.
- A quote from Richard really helped me through many fearful and terrifying situations:
Richard: ‘… a fact is actual. One cannot argue about a fact as one can about a belief or a truth … one can only deny a fact and pretend that it is not there. Then the question to ask is: ‘Why depression? Because when I see the fact of something … the fact sets me free of choice. … When I see clearly … then I can proceed … for then there is action. Seeing the fact – which is seeing without choice – then there is action … and this action is not of ‘my’ doing.’ (Richard, List B, No. 23a, 12 Oct 1998)- The final fact was: if I wanted to be free, then ‘I’ have to disappear, self-immolate. What is the point of complaining about this fact? What is the point of postponing the journey because of fear? Fear is the ‘normal’, instinctual reaction of my ‘self’, it is ‘par for the course’. I don’t have to let fear stop me from reaching my goal.
- Of course, it takes a good deal of bloody-mindedness and stubborn persistence, after all, it is quite a pioneering job we are doing here.
Of course, it took ‘her’ another 10 years before ‘she’ disappeared but it certainly eased fear and anxiety a lot. (Actualism, Vineeto, AF List, No. 6, 12.3.1999)
Felix: Now that I’m starting to acknowledge these deep, murky feelings 1. They are becoming much easier to deal with (as I’m not fighting them) and it is hugely encouraging when I do get back to feeling good 2. They are providing more impetus for becoming free (oh – this is the human condition → I’m in it just like everybody else → and it is indeed terrible and tragic → I need to do something about this).
That is truly wonderful.
Cheers Vineeto