Felix: Thanks for your reply Vineeto – I appreciate it must be hard to track the inner workings of a feeling being and what’s happening but I appreciate your efforts to understand and help.
I have actually been finding this knot thing incredibly helpful. I mean it’s painful/ has the essence of suffering but being “stuck” in this way is inviting progress as I deeply ask myself what it’s all about.
I think my description of going back to being a beginner may create the impression I have 600 layers of unexplored identity layers. Whereas I don’t think that’s the case.
As I feel throughout the day I’m mostly always aware of what I’m feeling. It might be anxiety, it might be boredom. The problem is that the “pain” point that these feelings create is not being relieved, but rather coalescing into a sum of its parts – a “pain” identity of feeling like I’m always carrying this heavy weight around or have my hand in a hot plate.
I’ve been going deeper and deeper into this. Why am I always feeling some version of bad? What would it take me to not feel this way?
Hi Felix,
As a reminder only, you may remember this quote – in order for the actualism method to work, it is important that you fully grasped that ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’ as contrasted to ‘I’ have feelings (which I don’t like). Here is how No. 60 described it –
RESPONDENT: ‘It has taken me a hell of a long time to understand the difference between having feelings and being those feelings. Because I have not clearly understood this, I’ve never quite got the hang of paying attention to feelings without praise or blame, and without notions of innocence and culpability, right and wrong, etc getting in the way.
This makes things very interesting. The moment I regard my ‘self’ as ‘having’ a feeling, I’m split down the middle and there’s a secondary reaction on the part of the social identity (an urge to “do something” about the feeling, which in turn evokes more feelings, and so on). Conversely, if I recognise that I am the feeling, it most often dissolves into thin air – and usually pretty quickly too.
This is great. It’s especially helpful with regard to anger and frustration which have been two of my biggest hurdles to date. Previously, when I caught myself being angry, annoyed or frustrated, identifying and paying attention to this feeling would NOT cause it to disappear. On the contrary, the feeling and the awareness of myself as ‘having’ it would sometimes become like a microphone and amplifier locked into a screaming feedback loop.
I’m really pleased that this is no longer happening. It seems almost too easy’. [emphasis in original]. (Thursday 28/10/2004 6:55 PM AEST)
RICHARD: And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is. (Richard, AF List, No. 60g, 30 Oct 2005a).
Hence my suggestion to check out any resentment, which would prevent you fully acknowledging and accepting that you are the feeling you are experiencing. When you stop objecting to feeling the way you feel and when you fully experience that you are the feeling, it is “almost too easy” to change from feeling bad to feeling felicitous because it is so obvious that feeling happy feels so much better than feeling bad.
The above quote is also an important reminder for anyone who has practiced any form of meditation where one creates a ‘watcher’ to observe one’s thoughts come and go. This creates an artificial, additional distance between ‘me’ and ‘my’ feelings which prevent the actualism method from working as intended. However, once one grasps and fully accepts that ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings, ‘I’ am the instinctual passions, then ‘I’ have a choice to be whichever feeling I prefer to be. Of course, the triggers still need to be investigates once feeling good in order for them to not be triggered again and again.
Felix: This has been taking me into naïveté. Its effect is amazing … this is the path forward I think. As an identity, I’ve given myself nowhere to go so to speak – all the usual doors to escape are locked because I know that any of the usual human pathways I could take are mere repetitions of the same old cycles, that they wont work, that nothing will ever be as “I” want it. I’ve tried to dominate myself, to dominate life – and that has “brought me to my knees in a sense” – it’s not going to ever happen like that.
All I know each moment again is that I want to feel good, that I don’t want to feel bad, and naïveté is helping me find this … it’s not possible to define what it is. But it’s what is manifest when I am naive.
So indeed, I’ve been applying “emergency naïveté” so to speak haha. Having no other option, I have had to discover naïveté for myself – the hard way, and against my natural inclinations which are anything but that.
That is almost funny, “against my natural inclinations”, and yet it is quite common that the natural naiveté of early childhood is so deeply buried that one often has to come to a point of feeling very foolish to have failed in order to rediscover one’s naiveté.
It is very fortunate that you did. It is indeed opening doors which had seemed closed.
Felix: It’s continuing now and I’m seeing things so differently. It’s not a question of my beliefs in this moment or that about this or that topic. It’s more like my whole belief in myself, and where I am. It’s like I change to seeing with a universal lens, not a self-centric/ maligned egocentric one.
On the other side of me and my problems there is this total wonder, and a sense of being anywhere/when.
So indeed all these problems I’ve described – the identity making to impossible, feeling trapped, doing everything right but everything being wrong … it seems to be my way into naïveté.
Stuff is opening up. I see a way forward, and an open door. (link)
Be careful not making this newly discovered naiveté into a new philosophy or system or imaginary identity, else it becomes a restricting cage to lock you in again. ‘Me’, the identity, is very inventive at devising cunning scenarios to keep ‘you’ in place.
Nourish the wonder, the amazement, the appreciation how wondrous and wonderful the world is when you see it afresh, each moment with eyes of simplicity, naiveté – guileless, unsophisticated, artless, ingenuous and open to a new experience each moment again.
Cheers Vineeto