Ian: I am doing what I can to recognise and understand my full self so that I can become friends with myself.
Not sure if one needs to “understand” one’s “full self” to become friends with oneself – it is more a matter of becoming aware of the habitual attitude, put into you by parents, teachers and peers, to ‘humble’ yourself, be hard on yourself, grovel and feel that you are not good enough – whatever you do or achieve.
Once you recognize this habitual pattern, the very awareness allows you to stop feeding it and voila, there is already some burden off your back. It’s the affective attentiveness which allows you to do that.
Just think, if you had a habit of wiggling your toe or slightly sticking your tongue out when doing something challenging and someone pointed that out while it’s happening – you would instantly be able to stop it. The same is the case with the habit to put yourself down, except for this you develop the affective attentiveness to catch yourself doing it and then just stop. And right afterwards, to replace the detrimental habit with a positive one, you pat yourself on the back for having caught it. It is really that simple.
Ian: As Richard said on a transcript: “It is a good thing to become friends with yourself, to decide not to tell yourself off any more”.
Richard has also written: “In a nutshell: one cannot examine something fully if one is busy denying its existence.”
Ian: and even better as feeling being Vineeto put it:
“For me, the very first step in this investigation was to admit that deep down, I was governed by instinctual passions – predominantly fear, aggression, nurture and desire. This simple act of acknowledgement meant that any feelings of guilt and shame (that ‘I’ am a criminal for having these passions) or feelings of self-righteousness (that ‘I’ am a saint for having repressed or denied these passions) that arose in my investigations were clearly seen for what they were – the inevitably by-products of socialization.
For anyone who has done some ‘self’-investigation it is obvious that one can only observe and investigate human instinctual passions if one is friends with oneself and coopts any aspect of oneself as an ally in this investigation into the human psyche. Here is an example of how I described to someone what I mean by investigating feelings.
Maintaining a moralistic attitude towards one’s instinctual passions unavoidably results in avoidance, denial and detachment. For this reason actualists have always maintained that before one can begin to examine one’s instinctual passions it is essential to first rekindle one’s naiveté and be guided by pure intent born from the experience of the perfection of the actual world. Then one can begin to take apart one’s social identity – one’s spiritual values and beliefs and one’s social morals and ethics – in order to replace them with naiveté and the pure intent to have the already always existing peace-on-earth become apparent.”
Ok, once you have become accustomed to no longer put yourself down, you can start with the actualism method proper. Apply the same affective attentiveness (attention to how you feel) in order to see if you started to dip from feeling good (just the normal general feeling when someone asks you how you are and you reply “good”). When you notice a diminishment of feeling good – and you can only notice it when you don’t suppress the feeling itself – you stop feeding it, i.e. you don’t fight against it or wallow in it. There is no wisdom to be found in prolonging any feeling.
You get back to feeling good, just the basic being ok, ‘good’. Then, at your leisure, you can in a far more dispassionate mood than if you were in the middle of feeling bad, look at what triggered you to slip, just like it is described in This Moment of Being Alive article.
Often just finding the trigger and recognizing that it’s only a bagatelle and not worth wasting precious good time over it is enough. Only when the feeling gets triggered over and over and you recognize that it’s a bigger issue which causes distress, do you need to “investigate” as feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ described it above. For instance, what is my belief that I am getting constantly annoyed over the same thing? “It unfair, unjust and I want to feel righteous indignation over it”, for instance. Well, in that case, you can recognize the fact that life is not fair and why should you punish yourself with bad feelings in order to feel superior – looks silly, doesn’t it? And with that change in attitude, another burden is falling away …
Beliefs where relatively easy for ‘Vineeto’ – even though some of them took weeks to understand their full extent – but once ‘she’ had figured out what it was, and that it was only what ‘she’ believed and not because it was an immutable fact, then suddenly the whole particular construct crumbled and disappeared, and what a relief! This includes particular morals and ethics from your social identity which, with pure intent in place, you no longer need to believe in (without be a danger to society).
Instinctual passions are different – they don’t disappear until you are actually free. What you can do, however, by not resisting /fighting or indulging the feeling, you can change their affective energy into felicitous energy. Richard wrote about how he dealt with anger by neither expressing nor repressing it and you can use the same technique for the other passions with the requisite affective attentiveness.
Ian: I’m really still a ‘beginner’ despite having found the actualfreedom.com.au website in 2007 as I don’t have the knack yet as you put it:
Vineeto: “To be “uncovering and looking at everything that makes up me” you do not need to keep feeling each feeling until it subsides of its own accord (and embracing it only fuels the feeling to hang around for longer) – it is enough to recognize it and then stop feeding it (which may take a while to find the switch until you get the knack).”
This is the main difficulty; I haven’t got the knack yet - and I’m not sure why either - would love to figure this one out as it’s really the only thing I need to be able to do. Are you able to go into more detail on how stopping feeding a feeling is like in action. Was there something in particular you had to realise or uncover before you got the knack, or was it a series of experiments on how to do it until you figured it out.
I think there’s something I am still not aware of that keeps me from going down this path. Some need to continue tolerating feeling all the feelings.
In the meantime I’m still examining myself, gathering information and getting a handle on what it means to be a feeling being and the silliness of it, the impact it has on my life and the life of those around me.
The ‘knack’ is to get your affective attentiveness up and running whenever you remember to do so. Then noticing how you feel you deal with it as I described above. With the first successes happening, especially regarding the habit of putting yourself down, you recognize that you found the ‘knack’ and it wasn’t really difficult after all.