Read this written by Kuba ( is my addition )
but also ‘my’ very existence is perpetuated by this habit, of: ‘I’ want to ‘live’ in that future moment.
It’s the only way to exist that ‘I’ know of,
across the past ( “I” looked younger, was more … etc. etc. ) ----- , present ( why am I bored, what I am gonna do, will I be able to figure actualism out, etc. etc.) ---- and future ( what will happen to me, I will get old, sick and die etc. etc. )…but never here where this moment is happening.
I found the text below helpful, if there are any points in which it contradicts with AF practice or how it can be improved upon, please let me know, appreciated :
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the point of contact ( the very first & quick moments ) in the chain of [dependent origination]
—you are already ( in everyday life ) experiencing these contact moments all of the time, but not paying much heed to them. Here’s one description,
When you first become aware of something, there is a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it. … It is that flashing split second just as you focus your eyes on the thing, just as you focus your mind on the thing, just before you objectify it, clamp down on it mentally and segregate it from the rest of existence. It takes place just before you start thinking about it—before your mind says, "Oh, it’s a dog."
Applying , HAIETMOBA. ( so one can start to Eaatmoba, as per claudiu )
To trigger a PCE, one asks oneself (with sincerity!), “How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?”—HAIETMOBA. This query acts like a chisel that, diligently applied, sooner-or-later thrusts one into the PCE.
When one asks HAIETMOBA, one of three things happen:
Nothing, because you failed to invoke it with sincerity, instead treating it as a chore. You have to be interested in the answer or the method doesn’t work.
You become aware of the dominant mood coloring your current experience.
You become aware of the “point of contact” ( appreception ).
Entrance to the PCE
By repeating the query, HAIETMOBA ,
perhaps once every 5 to 10 seconds,
the mind is consistently returned to this fleeting moment of awareness, the “point of contact”., your concentration grows and attention starts to stabilize at this point.
These moments of “pure awareness” lengthen and take up an increasing share of your experience as a whole.
As long as your ego-self is subdued, meaning you are in an at least neutral mood – and your thoughts are near exclusively HAIETMOBA, each time that you ask HAIETMOBA there is a chance that you will experience a foreground-background ( “you” vs Pure awarness ) reversal. Where before “you” were the dominant foreground experience and this moment of contact, this pure awareness, was a fraction of that, the background, this flips.
When it does, viola! Automatic, effortless awareness. No ego-self. That’s the PCE.
It’s this simple:
Subdue the ego-self.
Repeatedly investigate this moment of being alive.
PCE.
Yeah, but how do I subdue the ego-self?
You’ll notice when too much ego-self is being fabricated because
asking HAIETMOBA will point toward some mood, some kind of affective content. These moods and the ego-self are intertwined and, when there is too much of either, they block the PCE from occuring.
Experientially, this ‘blocking’ feels quite literal, as HAIETMOBA keeps hitting on this mood instead of moments of pure awareness. It really does feel as if this ego-self and emotions are getting in the way, that they are an obstruction. Bad moods are especially sticky and difficult in this regard.
HAIETMOBA does not work well when done from a sour state.
There are a bunch of things you can try here. Remember, the goal is a state with less selfing.
You’re looking for a state with less thinking, less problemness, free of negative emotion. Less
Anything that gets you there will work, like:
When a thought, tension, problem, etc. pulls you away , mindfully release it, relax the body, and smile. Rest in this state until another distraction surfaces. Repeat for maybe ten minutes.Then try HAIETMOBA again.
One of the reasons that bad moods are so stable is because there is a strong sense of “having a problem.” This problem tends to keep the bad mood around. When this negative mood is in the way of a PCE, the bad mood is itself the problem which then circularly justifies its existence.
You soon find yourself in a bad mood because you’re in a bad mood. Ridiculous, but often surprisingly difficult to notice.
In general, you will be best served by being open to and recognizing whatever mood is currently occuring. Often, genuinely acknowledging whatever mood is there can be enough to shift it. Ignoring it or resisting it and thinking “I don’t want this mood” all serve as fuel for the perpetuation of the ego self, the opposite of what you’re trying to do.
If all else fails, just wait! The mood will eventually pass. Try again later.
Tips
Happiness & Fascination
A good mood acts as a powerful accelerant for triggering a PCE. In a good mood HAIETMOBA is an amplifier, enhancing the joy of this moment of being alive. This motivates you to pay greater attention to HAIETMOBA, in turn creating more joy, creating a positive feedback loop.
This loop evolves into a fascination with this present moment , powerful in itself, and this joy additionally pacifies the ego-self. Talk about a pairing! As fine as peanut butter on a sweet potato (just try it). Foom. Escape velocity. PCE.
When this interest develops into a fascination, one does not have to generate enthus****iasm, as is the case when one is merely interested. Fascination pulls one forward.
Grooving
Use your environment to your advantage ! Combine HAIETMOBA with stuff you enjoy:
put on your favorite music, walk in nature, , breathe deep and soak in this moment.
Feel it in this flesh & blood body. Notice the endless detail in this world around you.
Diligence
HAIETMOBA will eventually, inevitably trigger a PCE if it is investigated with enough diligence. Aim to spend at least 30 minutes consistently and sincerely investigating HAIETMOBA every 5 to 10 seconds. If you can manage that, you will eventually get there.
But be careful not to end up treating yourself as both slave driver & slave.
This isn’t rigid drudgery to be endured. There’s something and not nothing, how odd! Let’s investigate.
Addendum: May 2018
With the benefit of a couple more months of practice with HAIETMOBA, I’ve a few new thoughts about the practice and have been meaning to update this page.
The main thing I’d like to add is to emphasize the importance of the emotional component of HAIETMOBA.
I fleshed this out more in one conversation I had over email:
WHAT exactly is meant by “how” in HAIETMOBA? How can be taken in a couple different ways. As in, what is the quality (affect) of this moment? Or, what is the actual mechanism by which I am experiencing sensory input? I actually think I found Richar’s answer on one of the threads, and he said it was the first. But perhaps it makes sense to play around with the phrase in different ways?
Yeah, this is one of the main things I want to update in my article on HAIETMOBA, to add a greater emphasis on the emotional aspect. Here are two bits from the AF website:
To explain: the whole point of asking oneself, each moment again until it becomes a non-verbal attitude or a wordless approach to life, how one is experiencing this moment of being alive (the only moment one is ever alive) is to experientially ascertain just exactly what is the way or manner in which one is personally participating in the events which are occurring at this particular moment that one is alive … after all, irregardless of whether one takes the back seat or not, we are all busy doing this business called being alive by the very fact of being a sentient creature known as a human being (with all that inheres in being and doing that).
Affectively, of course … that is how you are experiencing this moment. Look, let us not unnecessarily complicate things here. The ‘how’ simply means ‘what feeling am I experiencing right now with’ … which is: ‘Am I bored?’, ‘Am I resentful?’, ‘Am I at ease?’, ‘Am I glad?’, ‘Am I sad?’ and so on.
Y****ou see, peace-on-earth is here right now – the perfection of the infinitude of this universe is happening at this moment – and you are missing out on it because you are feeling what it is like to be here instead of actually being here. Hence: ‘How am I experiencing this moment’ means ‘What feeling is preventing the on-going experiencing of peace-on-earth?’
The idea is sort of, well, imagine if you went around all day and paid very close attention to the sensations in your left foot. Over time, you’d get better and better in keeping your foot in conscious awareness as you went about your daily life. Indeed, you’d probably get so good at this that your ability would well surpass whatever you had imagined accomplishing when you began.
HAIETMOBA aims to do this same thing, but instead of foot sensations, you’re developing
an acute awareness to how you’re relating ( emotionally) to being here, now.
It’s like strength training, in that this capacity, this awareness, becomes fuller and deeper and automatic over time, in a way that has been (at least to me) surprising**.**
I’ve been walking around with this sort of arrogant assumption that of course I know how I’m feeling but, when I take the time to reflect "well, maybe I don’t know what this moment is like. What am I really feeling right now?"
and take a few long moments to shuffle through my mind, I often find that I was mistaken in my belief that I was feeling neutral or whatever, and there’s actually some grief or annoyance there. And this emotional awareness is malleable and trainable. Neat!
Now, the point of doing this ( HAIETMOBA )is that this affective awareness acts sort of like a compass, one you can use to steer yourself into calmer waters and get back to enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive. This is what Richard is saying here, although in somewhat convoluted language:
Note: asking how one is experiencing this moment of being alive is not the actualism method; consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is what the actualism method is. […] 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.
This segues nicely into another piece of the Actualist tool, which is working with triggers, mentioned above as “the slightest diminishment of enjoyment and appreciation automatically activates attentiveness.” The idea is that you stabilize into a state of enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive. Then, using the affective awareness you’ve developed with HAIETMOBA, you notice whenever your state changes, whenever you’re pulled from being happy and harmless. Working backward, you track down what it was that offended you so, notice how silly whatever it was, and then you’re back to enjoying the present moment. Repeat.
Over time, this uproots more and more of your habitual triggers, resulting in fewer interruptions in enjoying this moment of being alive, further stabilizing this present-focused savoring and appreciation.
I’ set the minimum standard of experience for myself: feeling good. If ‘I’ am not feeling good then ‘I’ have something to look at to find out why. What has happened, between the last time ‘I’ felt good and now? When did ‘I’ feel good last? Five minutes ago? Five hours ago? What happened to end those felicitous feelings? Ahh … yes: ‘He said that and I …’. Or: ‘She didn’t do this and I …’. Or: ‘What I wanted was …’. Or: ‘I didn’t do …’. And so on and so on … one does not have to trace back into one’s childhood … usually no more than yesterday afternoon at the most (‘feeling good’ is an unambiguous term – it is a general sense of well-being – and if anyone wants to argue about what feeling good means … then do not even bother trying to do this at all).
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. This is called nipping it in the bud before it gets out of hand … with application and diligence and patience and perseverance one soon gets the knack of this and more and more time is spent enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive. And, of course, once one does get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy and harmless’ … and after that to ‘feeling perfect’.
(Source of all of these quotes is the “this moment of being alive” page.)
This, I think, is the “core loop” of the AF method.
Enjoying yourself → trigger → not enjoying yourself → realize enjoyment diminished → rewind and investigate → notice it’s silly → back to enjoying yourself.
(Figuring out your triggers this way is often really interesting and rewarding, as many of them are unconscious and thus surprising.)
For this to really work, you need to be running the thing (HAIETMOBA )a lot.
If I’m lazy and haven’t been practicing for a couple of days and then find myself in the middle of a free-floating sadness without an apparent cause, I never have any luck walking back and finding a trigger. Usually I just wait until I’m feeling neutral to get the thing (HAIETMOBA) going again.
Strong attention on the body is also really useful for a couple of reasons—it tends to anchor one more fully in the present, the sensory organs are brimming with enjoyable things (smells, tastes, textures), and noticing tension enhances affective awareness.
Last thing I want to touch on is apperception/PCE.
My current thinking is that when you’re not in a PCE, it implies that there is an emotion outside of conscious awareness that is “running things from below.” When you expand awareness so that it contains everything happening inside/outside, then awareness becomes self-aware and thus apperception/PCE.
This is ( HAIETMOBA ) easiest when done from a base of feeling good, because strong attention to this moment when feeling good results in a feedback loop of more feeling good, which leads to fascination, which naturally pulls everything into consciousness → PCE.
This is ( HAIETMOBA ) easiest when done from a base of feeling good, because strong attention to this moment when feeling good results in a feedback loop of more feeling good, which leads to fascination, which naturally pulls everything into consciousness → PCE.
I’ve found it very useful along these lines to relax into a state of open defenselessness. It’s like…
you know when you’re in a conversation and someone says something that hits on one of your identity buttons, and you tense up and start to feel like you’re being attacked? Take that state and do the opposite. Open, non-defensive ease. Then, adopt a stance of, “Maybe I don’t know what this moment is like, even though I feel like I do,” and proceed with sincere investigation of this moment.
Actually, last last thing, you say here:
Or, what is the actual mechanism by which I am experiencing sensory input?
or emotional reactivity ( automatic "perception / judgments " ?
I don’t know how important this is for AF, but I think this this can take you some interesting places. You know how, when you first learned to drive a car , everything was first effortful, you had to think through “this one is the brake, this one is the gas,” but eventually it all became automatic and habitual? I think something similar happens with perception during childhood, where stuff like judging/wanting/object recognition/sense of self become automatic and habitual.
Thing is, and you can do this with a physical skill, if you bring strong attention (“beginner’s mind”) back to what you’re doing, it loses this automatic crystallization and becomes malleable again.
I think you can similarly unpack a lot of the habitual, unconscious mechanisms supporting “your world,” the actual mechanics of your perception. Then you can modify them.
In the AF context, this is most often mentioned around replacing the habitual judgments of good or bad with silly or sensible.
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‘You’, the thinking and feeling entity, relentlessly monitors the sensory input and continuously maintains a thinking and feeling response to it.
I use the words relentless and continuously deliberately for this monitoring process is instinctual in nature – it is genetically programmed in all animal species. Subsequently whenever you touch something, there is always a ‘me’ thinking and feeling as though ‘I’ am touching something as opposed to the direct sensation of nerve ends responding to stimuli. This is what I mean by – a self’-less sensuous appreciation of being here is often likely to happen when you are not busy with ‘your’ thoughts and feelings
Also read this on HAIETMOBA :
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Hietmoba : I usually ask this along with an implicit subordinate question that guides me to analyze more skillfully my moment of being alive: How far am I from a PCE?
One thing I’ve noticed about HAIETMOBA is that it not only directs attentiveness both outward and inward, it implies felicity in a sort of “why not” kind of way. This simple yet powerful directive seems to really do the trick to not only pay attention to this moment, but to really revel in it in a clear, sensate way, as well as engendering delightful contemplation in the manner of, “oh, hey, yeah. this moment really is nice, this is nice, this thing is nice, there’s lots of good things going on right now! ha ha!”
That I’m experiencing anything at all is pretty amazing really. That right now the whole lot is passing through firstly the pure pre-symbolic awareness ( sensuousness as Richard has called it ) then through a symbolic layer of mental /emotional identification. Keeping it in mind that it (pre-symbolic pure awareness, or pure consciousness) is already happening, I’m not adjusted enough in my perspective to appreciate it just yet.
I read in posts about seeing the world with a child’s perspective, or as though you are looking at something, really looking at something, for the first time ever. Going round pretending I had just been zapped into this body, had never heard sounds before, had never seen colors before, had never seen matter or shapes, gave the everything a fresh, unfamiliar feel.
Do this with sincerity, have fun with it and enjoy what it is to just be here in this moment, sooner or later a PCE will happen and you’ll get what all the fuss is about…Ha!