AdamH: 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.
Hi Adam,
Welcome back to the forum. Great to hear your detailed report and success.
As you have mentioned stress, and work stress in particular, maybe this is the topic to direct your affective attentiveness to in order to determine what causes you to feel this stress in the first place.
There is not much point aiming for naiveté or even “care to be innocence personified” (which only an actually free person can be) before you are able to recognize, dismantle and abandon the triggers for feeling stressed. You say that stress equally affects your mood in your “first-time” relationship, so the feeling of stress can have multiple and diverse as yet unexamined reasons. Once you start paying close attention you will find a treasure-trove of exciting discoveries that can make your life instantly better when you understand each issue more fully as how ‘you’ tick – and thus be able to get back to feeling good and appreciating much more quickly.
AdamH: 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 naiveté is essential to (or perhaps the same as?) being happy and harmless.
This is excellent. Still stress, according to your report, seems to interrupt feeling good and wants to be addressed –
Gary: I gave some thought as to whether I am ‘tracking’ the waking entity, and I think I am. I seem to go over the same emotions over and over again and the same repetitive thoughts until I give up the chase and relax, often to but take up the tracking the next day.
Richard: If it be not fun to track oneself in all of one’s doings then one might as well ‘give up the chase and relax’ … however what you describe as a modus operandi does not make sense to me (‘go over the same emotions over and over again and the same repetitive thoughts until I give up the chase and relax’).
To need to (and to be able to) ‘relax’ means there must be tension in the first place to relax from … thus the tracking down has changed from tracking down the ‘same emotions’ or the ‘same repetitive thoughts’ to tracking down the tension … and you did not notice that the game had changed horses in mid-stream. The need to ‘relax’ is a flashing red light that the game-play has changed: ‘when did this tension start?’; how did this tension begin?’; ‘what was the event that initiated this tension?’; ‘what were the feelings at the time?’; ‘what was the thought associated with that feeling?’ … and so on. Usually one has only to track back a few minutes or a few hours … yesterday afternoon at the most. Then one is free from both the tension and the ‘Tried and True’ cure of ‘relax’.
Speaking personally, I never relaxed in all those years of application and diligence, patience and perseverance … upon exposure to the bright light of awareness the tension always disappeared. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, AF List, Gary, 28 Jan 2001)
AdamH: I remember being particularly stirred by this from Vineeto:
Vineeto to Kuba: With the thrilling permission for ‘you’ to die and the passionate care to be innocence personified in place you have blessed set in motion your demise – nothing can go wrong. (link)
AdamH: especially the endorsement of Kuba’s ‘passionate care to be innocence personified’, recognizing that it had never really been part of how I approached actualism.
Of course, it is beneficial to experiment with being naïve and use all the good tips and information Claudiu (link) just gave you. What feeling being ‘Vineeto’ found that for ‘her’ being naïve was at first not easy to establish, ‘she’ had to have success in other areas with applying the actualism method consistently and rigorously, such as dismantling various beliefs, and all the while ‘she’ was determined to be ruthlessly honest with herself and being more and more sincere. Out of that sincerity ‘she’ then could allow ‘herself’ to be more and more unsophisticated and guileless.
Richard: There is a marked distinction betwixt spontaneity and impetuosity (aka impulsiveness) … acuity and/or perspicacity, in the applied form of discrimination, discernment (as in being expedient, provident, judicious, prudent) in conjunction with pragmatism, practicality, sensibility, simplicity, and so forth, gives ready access for any introspective/ creative process to take place. With no identity in situ/ no affective faculty extant, to stuff things up, it is all quite effortless. (Richard, AF List, No. 103, 1 Oct 2005d)
You can change Richard’s last sentence to “with a diminished identity in situ/ a diminished affective faculty extant” – then it becomes clear that the more diminished the identity becomes, naiveté will increase accordingly.
AdamH: 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. (link)
Mmh, becoming more and more happy and increasingly harmless, i.e. considerate, in your daily life is the best thing you can do for your fellow beings right now, particular for your partner, and of course for yourself. In other words, when you emanate less and less stressful feelings and vibes and are able to neither suppress them nor acting on them, and/or eventually not having them arise in the first place, the less you contribute to stress circulating and multiplying. Start from where you are at, and with pure intent the progress of the actualism method will fall into place organically.
It’s best to avoid creating conceptual maps, which you then try to follow, as this methodology, so tempting for many, only leads to strife (stress), self-deception, and ultimately disappointment … and is in the very opposite to being naïve.
I snipped the next section because Claudiu has already answered it. (link).
Cheers Vineeto