Felix: Hey Vineeto
It’s funny because my message was about taking a direct route and avoiding a clean up.
Hi Felix,
Ha, I wouldn’t recommend it – you have a habit of changing any task you set yourself into a sudorific enterprise. First get this habit of doing so completely out of your system with an ongoing affective attentiveness and focus on enjoyment and appreciation.
Felix: But ever since that PCE I have been doing nothing but clean up and it’s fantastic.
Excellent.
Felix: I can’t make declaratory statements about exactly what’s happening, but I am in a totally new phase of discovering freedom.
Ha, you can’t? You just did, and continue to do so too 
Felix: I actually think this is paving the way for virtual freedom – I seem to be successfully eliminating anxiety, which at root is what has held myself and my identity in place so punitively all these years.
It’s quite amazing. When I read about Richard eliminating anger some years ago, I didn’t see how he did it. And so I didn’t do anything similar.
First, Richard said after the event he described (link) full-blow anger was gone. Second, anger and fear are different. Fear, the one which arises when one fully recognizes that ‘I’ am nothing but a contingent ‘being’, is an existential fear, you can’t eliminate that just like that. It only goes when you self-immolate in your entirety.
Anxiety, which is not of the same existential nature, is comparatively easy to handle, once you have recognized and dealt with the habit of suppressing and running away from your feelings. You seem to have successfully worked yourself out of the ‘state of anxiety’ accompanied by painful physical symptoms, so now all the different forms of anxiety are ready to be picked and disinclined whenever you become aware of them interfering with your enjoyment and appreciation.
Felix: I understand @scout when he says that asking HAIETMOBA seems to have increased anxiety. Of course anything that is not in the direction of happy and harmless is not the method, but I do understand how the identity misappropriates the method and mucks it all up big time.
Well I don’t think you read Scout’s reply to me carefully enough –
VINEETO: Are you saying that the moment you become aware how you experience yourself, the fact of being aware makes the experience “painful and exhausting”? Or has it been like that all along, and you were refusing to/afraid to acknowledge it?
SCOUT: The latter, but lending it attention makes the pain feel more acute than numbing it (even though I remain low-grade agitated while numbing too). I’ve been trying to work on not fighting it, it’s just hard bc if I don’t it feels kind of overwhelming. (link)
You see he recognized that the feelings where there before and becoming aware of them “makes the pain feel more acute than numbing it.” Which means it is not as you say “that asking HAIETMOBA seems to have increased anxiety” – so stop spreading discouraging rumours about the actualism method, just because you interpreted your own experience with the actualism method this way. I still think that Scout’s experience is the same that yours was – the actualism method makes you aware of what is already there.
And from false interpretation or sloppy observation arises resentment, and another obstacle to feeling good is added.
Felix: Reading what you recently wrote about control really helped – reinforcing that it’s not my fault if I get triggered and I don’t have to stamp it out like a fire or something haha. This “allowance” of what is, is key to freedom I think.
You mean this bit?
Vineeto to Scout: So that is an understanding which needs to happen first, at a fundamental level. You are this swirling vortex created by ever-changing instinctual passions and it is not your fault (because everyone is born that way).
With this firmly in mind you can stop blaming yourself and you will find that the moment you do that, the feeling itself will diminish (not disappear) but lose some of its strength. The reason is that fighting the feeling you are feeding it.
Now when you put this in practice and notice the effect, you can pat yourself on the back that you had your first insight and success. Be a friend to yourself (the only one you are with 24hrs a day).
The other benefit of recognizing and accepting that you are your feelings is that you are not a victim, neither a victim of your own feelings nor a victim of other people’s feelings. (link)
Or perhaps this one?
Richard: What I have observed over many years is that a normal person has a propensity to blame – to find fault rather than to find causes – when it comes to dealing with the human condition … if for no other reason than that finding the cause means the end of ‘me’ (or the beginning of the end of ‘me’).
Whereas endlessly repeating mea culpa keeps ‘me’ in existence. (Richard, AF List, No. 27c, 9 Sep 2002).
Felix: Another thing that has really helped is understanding the difference between different feeling states and using feeling good as a comparative measure. By that I mean, when feeling good, I look back at previous emotional struggles I had a day or two earlier and ask what it was about.
Well, that really is a sign that the “previous emotional struggles” have disappeared out of your system. It’s fascinating how it works, hey?
Felix: It’s starting to really make sense that to feel anxious is so silly – it adds absolutely nothing and only brings its own problems. But it wouldn’t have been enough just to call it silly – it’s the familiarity with feeling good which is the mop that cleans everything up.
If feeling anxious was making unwell, which it was, feeling happy and harmless is making me well – and it feels great to feel that happening also.
This is excellent – when you can see that being anxious is silly because it makes you unwell, then it is so easy to get back to feeling good. You are back to where you wanted to be, and stay, on November 3 2024 –
Felix: Since then, feeling good has been arising very easily – which is all quite simple and delightful.
I’m just inviting it more and more, which is as much about staying out of the way and not getting triggered than anything else.[emphasis added]. (link)
Felix: I haven’t been throwing down any gauntlets to myself re self immolation; I’m enjoying the journey of progress so to speak for now (link)
Ha, this is warrior language – do you see your life as a battle against demons and dragons and other antagonists? In fact, against yourself and ‘self’-immolation as a battle to be fought. My, my, you still have a lot to learn lol. Just as well you “haven’t been throwing down any gauntlets” .
I had understood that being friends with yourself had appealed to you? Maybe I was wrong.
Cheers Vineeto
+++
Felix: I remember the phrase I referred to. Richard would ask himself if he wants to be “dull and degenerate” (link)
Here it is – and he didn’t ask “himself”, he said “to ask oneself”, as a ‘wake-up jab’. It is in only one correspondence (then copied into 4 selected correspondences) – no wonder I didn’t remember it –
VINEETO: Richard gave a wonderful description on how to induce a peak-experience: ‘To get out of ‘stuckness’ one gets off one’s backside and does whatever one knows best to activate delight. Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity/ innocuity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all … and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life … the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is … and one is the experiencing of what is happening. But refrain from possessing it and making it your own … or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared. (Richard, AF List, Alan, 13 Dec 1998).
RESPONDENT: I have a bit of trouble summoning up delight (as Richard suggests), as it seems imaginary, as opposed to the release that comes with facing issues. That is still under consideration though.
RICHARD: The first sentence of above paragraph is specifically designed to get one out of ‘stuckness’ … it is not intended as an on-going way of living life. It is a short, sharp shock of attention – a ‘kick-start’ in the jargon – to counteract the ‘I didn’t ask to be born’ resentment that caused the stuckness in the first place. Another ‘wake-up jab’ (which makes use of any remnant of pride) is to ask oneself: ‘I have two choices right now: being happy and harmless or being dull and degenerate … which way do I sensibly choose to spend this never-to-be-repeated precious moment of living so that I can honestly call myself a mature adult?’
A happy and harmless person has a much better chance of precipitating a PCE … which is the essential pre-requisite for an actual freedom (otherwise this is all theory). It goes without saying, surely, that a grumpy person locks themselves out of being here … now.
For a full and comprehensive explication of what this succinct paragraph conveys you may care to access the article: ‘Attentiveness and Sensuousness and Apperceptiveness’ on my Web Page. [emphasis added]. (Richard, AF List, No. 3, 16 Feb 1999).
Cheers Vineeto