It’s been almost three years since I last made a journal entry, wow, time flies. I’ve thought about posting a number of times and occasionally written out a post and deleted it. Usually while rereading a post before hitting ‘reply’ I find some objection to the post, and most often that objection is that I already know the ‘answer’ to my problems is in the very simple very direct application of the actualism method, and that everything I’m writing amounts to procrastination and avoidance. Although I think this is true, I also think that writing may help end the procrastination sooner, especially considering that I am effectively writing journal posts inside my head anyway 
I think the essence of what I have learned in the last 31 months is that pursuits of material success don’t bring lasting fulfillment. It seems like normally people learn this before learning the same lesson with spiritual success, but having been intensively engaged in spirituality (Buddhism) early in life, I think I may have learned these lessons in the opposite order. Long story short I went back to school while working part time, applied myself intensely, and made the transition from working in the food service industry to working as a data engineer in the digital marketing industry. This new profession is certainly more financially lucrative and less physically demanding, but, as I’m now seeing clearly, it has precisely the same potential for stress, discontentment, and disharmony with others. I think this insight is something I understood and believed in all along but I certainly held out hope that somehow I would be in a better position to deal with these things after this ‘upward’ transition in real-world terms.
The other big change in this time was entering into my first (still ongoing) long-term relationship with my girlfriend. We’ve been living together and spending almost all of our free time together all this time, in relatively good (but far from perfect) harmony and intimacy. There’s no other place in my life where there is such direct feedback for the quality of my actualism practice as there is in how I experience our relationship. When I’m not applying the actualism method, the relationship can feel unfair and stifling, while when I am applying it things can feel incredibly intimate to the point of feeling magical, like there is no separation between us. These ways of experiencing can alternate fairly rapidly where I feel like I can ascend and descend through that spectrum of experience in the course of a week. With ‘work stress’ on the other hand where relationships are much more measured and controlled, that same alternation in mode of experience is much more internal.
So with that recap out of the way, I’ll turn my focus to how I’m pursuing that better way of experiencing, and what is preventing me from applying it more consistently. Since this post is getting pretty long, I will try and stay light on the details, with a plan to post more consistently and fill them in a bit over time in a less formal style and in dialogue with anyone who chooses to comment.
My focus, inspired by the successes of several participants and their interactions with Vineeto, has mostly been on diving into naivete. This has been a process of making an effort to recognize that I am my feelings, that I can choose how I want to be, and that being naivete is essential to (or perhaps the same as?) being happy and harmless. I remember being particularly stirred by this from Vineeto:
especially the endorsement of Kub’s ‘passionate care to be innocence personified’, recognizing that it had never really been part of how I approached actualism.
Since then, I’ve been attempting to galvanize that passionate care which is for this body and everybody to flourish through ‘my’ seeking naivete, which is inextricably linked to seeking my end. Directly recognizing that my calculating/guileful tendencies are the very thing that prevents happiness and harmless is a small step from seeing that my being is the very thing that prevents perfection.
All this feels clear while I write it, but what is not so clear is how I will successfully function in the competitive world in which I live, surrounded by fellow calculating and guileful identities, if I dive with greater abandon into naivete and eventually innocence. It’s like I know that I could sacrifice my cunning in exchange for peace and harmony, but I don’t know with confidence that this body will continue to provide for itself and others in an environment where those identities are competing for the same resources as me (and of course they too are largely driven by their fear of mine and others cunning).
I have moments of confidence in this brain’s ability to accomplish everything necessary with ease, and I also have shocks where I fall back down into the fray upon seeing the undeniable insecurity of my employment/wealth/reputation/whatever. I think there is some failure to fully distinguish naivete from pacifism at an experiential level, plus a lack of consistent experiences of naivete that would give me confidence in my ability to live my life in that state. Additionally, I think I am driven by instinct to achieve something that is not actually possible, which is a permanent security/survival of some sort, and since I know there is nothing that can be practically done to achieve this impossibility, my efforts are effectively reduced to emotional grasping for it and lamenting its unattainability.
Anyway, that’s all for now, but more to come!
Cheers,
Adam