Felix; I’ve started embarking on the “PCE walk” again – I think it’s been years since I was going that route emphatically.
I’m in a different position now, so it was a really interesting experience.
I’m going to start at the end, how I’m feeling now, and work back.
I’m currently experiencing a sensuous anonymity – much less in the way than my daily self. Awareness is dipping a lot deeper now, showing that the “shell” of me is wayyyyy more empty than I thought before.
My current “day to day” state is somewhat like – “ok I’m doing all the right things, I’m not chastising myself, I’m not pushing on experience, I’m not escaping, I’m not dissociating” – but still there is this sense of existential being mucking things up. A murkiness of fluctuating mood states that is definitely not as much attached to real world states anymore, but is nonetheless lurking there. It could also be caused by overactive mindfulness sort of dragging down my affective mood as well.
Hi Felix,
It’s great that you are tackling your habit of chastising yourself.
However, several things you have said in this post, and the next two messages, indicate that you are indeed still dissociating.
First, I like to let you know that a “PCE walk” is the invention of the ‘affers’, the people from Dharma Overground who have consistently attempted to marry their post-buddhistic practice with actualism (see Announcement). It is certainly not actualism –
Richard: This perpetual enjoyment and appreciation is facilitated by feeling as happy and as harmless as is humanly possible. And this (affective) felicity/ innocuity is potently enabled via minimisation of both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ feelings. An affective awareness is the key to maximising felicity and innocuity over all those alternate feelings inasmuch the slightest diminishment of enjoyment and appreciation automatically activates attentiveness. Attentiveness to the cause of diminished enjoyment and appreciation restores felicity and innocuity. The habituation of actualistic awareness and attentiveness requires a persistent initialisation; (…) If ‘I’ am not feeling good then ‘I’ have something to look at to find out why. (…) … one does not have to trace back into one’s childhood … usually no more than yesterday afternoon at the most. (…) Once the specific moment of ceasing to feel good is pin-pointed, and the silliness of having such an incident as that (no matter what it is) take away one’s enjoyment and appreciation of this only moment of being alive is seen for what it is – usually some habitual reactive response – one is once more feeling good … but with a pin-pointed cue to watch out for next time so as to not have that trigger off yet another bout of the same-old same-old. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, This Moment of Being Alive).
“Mindfulness” is a practice of ‘noting’ and not “an affective awareness” – which in contrast to ‘noting’ is an awareness how you experience your feelings at this moment of being alive. Also, ‘noting’ stops at simply ‘noting’ what’s going on whereas with the actualism methods you pay attention to “slightest diminishment of enjoyment and appreciation” and do what it takes to get back to enjoyment and appreciation, as described above.
Then you talk about “overactive mindfulness sort of dragging down my affective mood as well”. Mindfulness, overactive or not, is not the actualism method either, it is mental/ cognitive not affective, and instructs you to just note and put it aside as noted or, in buddhistic practice as unsatisfactory (dukkha).
Fact is that in the perceptive process feelings come first and then there is a cognitive response (what you call “mindfulness”) unless one has trained oneself to suppress feelings –
Hence what is necessary for the actualism method (not your version of it) to work is to actually allow yourself to feel the feelings.
Felix: This was the fodder for my walk, to try to work out this discrepancy. Affective awareness was my main tool, simply noticing the kind of undulating feelings I was experiencing as I went along, as well as the mental chatter that accompanied them. (…)
When you say “try to work out this discrepancy” – which “discrepancy” are you talking about? “Simply noticing the kind of undulating feelings” is not the actualist affective awareness with the sincere intent to get back to feeling good, enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive as described above, and as such ineffective at best.
Felix: I am just continuing to investigate, noticing these flavours that are coming through and attempting to penetrate the stygian nature of the psyche. (…) (link)
Before it makes sense “to penetrate the stygian nature of the psyche”, you first have to abandon the habit of dissociating from your feelings so that you are able to get back to feeling good. Remember:
Richard: “… one does not have to trace back into one’s childhood … usually no more than yesterday afternoon at the most.”
Perhaps it helps to remind you of what I wrote in my last post –
Vineeto: You are dissociating as long as you (instinctively) feel you can will/ force yourself to feel differently. To summarize and repeat the above –
- Stop fighting
- Stop blaming yourself (that in itself should result in getting back to feeling good)
- Stop calling this ‘doing actualism’
- Acknowledge and become aware that you are your feelings (your genetic heritage which all feeling being share)
- Be the feeling without rejection or blame or escaping
- Choose to be a different feeling (such as feeling good)
“Stop fighting” includes stopping dissociating. Notice dissociation and distancing, and pinpoint which feeling is dissociated from by stopping to fight this particular feeling. Only when you are no longer dissociating can you get back to feeling good, otherwise it is merely ignoration/ repression of the feeling.
Point 3: Stop calling this dissociation from feelings, “mindfulness”, doing “PCE-walk”, and an apparent “attempting to penetrate the stygian nature of the psyche” whilst still dissociating ‘actualism’ – it is not.
I am putting it so bluntly to save you more times of distress and going round in circles by using methodology which has nothing to do with the actualism method which is the key to get you out of your mess.
Felix: There is something here too as I continue to investigate/ contemplate.
Even when I’m attempting to be my feelings, STILL there is a cunning dissociation and distancing.
It’s like I see myself as the puppeteer of my own mood states, looking down at my feelings through a microscope.
And therefore my application of the method is also disrupted/ poisoned by this misunderstanding. To use another metaphor, it’s as if my attempt at the method is about trying to keep the ball of feeling good in the air. I am the one anxiously trying to keep the ball “where it needs to be”, rather than truly experientially understanding that my mood and me are literally one and the same. It’s me. (link)
Yes, that is a perspicacious and honest acknowledgement.
This dissociation is especially obvious when you describe what you call “looking down at my feelings through a microscope”. Other expressions are ‘keeping one’s feelings at arm’s length’, which is another euphemism for dissociation.
Even if you didn’t have official dissociation training such as vipassana, you nevertheless had learned to use it in your early life as a survival tactic with the result of having many feelings express themselves in psycho-somatic effects such as excessive stress.
I highly recommend Claudiu’s detailed and candid report of how he, eventually, successfully extracted himself from the habit of his learned dissociation –
Claudiu: Though I had noticed this in my own experience, I hadn’t formed it quite so succinctly in my mind. I noticed that, thanks to many months of training myself to do so following the advice written in MCTB and given to me by the DhO participants, is that I had reduced everything to physical sensations – touch, sight, sound, etc., with thoughts thrown in as well (though there was debate as to whether thoughts can also just be reduced to one of the five senses). Thus, when I felt something unpleasant in my body, or some persistent tension, the only recourse, meditatively, was to put my attention on it, and notice it as being ‘impermanent’ (that is, as according to MCTB, vibrating in real-time at a certain frequency), ‘not-self’ (that is, as according to MCTB, happening on its own without a ‘self’ involved), and ‘dukkha’ (that is, according to MCTB, unsatisfactory in some fundamental way). The affect itself is taken completely out of the picture. It is noticed, but it is noticed strictly as a physical sensation, and the solution is to do something about that physical sensation.(…) Thus there seems to be a tension with a weird and unknown cause because that very cause is something that one is denying exists. The tension is painful in and of itself but is made further painful by actively identifying it as unsatisfactory.
This naturally leads to aversion and one tries one’s hardest to make those sensations go away however one can, which ends up being an attempt to suppress the affect. (…)
The tensions were still there when I was not doing anything in particular, though, thanks to my aforementioned months of mental training. I found, though, that if I simply asked myself what the problem was, I would soon get an answer! I had noticed this before but it hadn’t quite hit home in the same way – whenever I felt that tension it simply meant that something was bothering me! It was remarkably difficult at first to figure out just what that was, though. The overwhelming unpleasantness of the physical tension made it hard to keep a cool head and actually look at what was going on. It was a fear of seeing what was actually wrong, likely because of the suppressive nature of the meditation I had been doing (even though I was self-describing it as not being suppressive). I found I thought of a metaphor wherein I had to undunk my head from my body in some intuitive way – to back off morbidly focusing on the physical sensations – to allow the affect to be felt.
This took some active doing but it was well-worth it. (…)
I still experience these tensions occasionally but now I’m actually able to say as much without causing the tension to arise/get any worse. Now I know that whenever something like that starts up, there’s simply something bothering me, and it’s just up to me to either sit down and figure out what it is on the spot, or, if I’m too tired or unwilling or lazy, to distract myself and put it off until later. The latter option is becoming less and less appealing as time goes on, however.
Richard: ‘Words cannot properly express just how much of a dastardly act it was for the affers to co-opt Actualism, subsume it under a tawdry facsimile of Buddhism (there have been no arahants for more than two millennia because of sectarianism), and thus unnecessarily perpetuate the suffering of humankind.
In eleven days time the direct-route, to the already always existing peace-on-earth, will have been available for three (3) years … and what do they do instead?
Go sit on a cushion, withdraw from the physical, induce altered states, ‘dark nights’, depressions, anxieties … there is even a jhana-jockey hospice being set-up to nurse the casualties.
‘Tis craziness run riot … utter madness’. (from Richard, Claudiu, 18 Dec 2012)
We talked about this before on the forum and you basically said it only partially applies to your own situation. Nevertheless I recommend reading it again with all possible (i.e. fascinated) attentiveness because I think a lot of this pattern is still operating and causing you distress and “seriousness” and a faulty interpretation of the actualism method.
Felix: Can I trade letting this moment live me – with my seriousness about trying to do (my version of) actualism.
I.e. can I let this moment be fun, each moment again; by dropping the habit of coopting every moment for its apparent utility in needing to achieve my aims as an actualist.
I think I can. (link)
You can try, of course. But I think you can only do this if you completely drop all aspects of “(my version of) actualism” and start afresh.
Cheers Vineeto