John

Journals
13

The forum is ultimately intended to be just that: a record of how various human beings in various circumstances over various periods of time can improve their lives to various degrees through AF.

So this kind of experience you are writing about is indeed human stuff, about which it may indeed be good for someone to read.

I myself have been both the writer and, many years later, that reader. So right now I am a mostly happy reader who often wrote believing that it would never be possible to be happy.

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14

I was watching geoffreys zoom video for the first time in many months. I have watched this video countless of times before (mainly during my peak interest of applying the method in the summer of 2021.) but this time was the first time when I no longer could relate to some of the things that were said by geoffrey.

Before… it was like I could relate to everything, even though I hadn’t had the experience (or very limited ‘peeks’) of things that were talked about. What was even more weird was that I at one or more occasions experienced it - as if what I’m personally doing - isn’t even in alignment with what he was saying or perhaps even going against it! That’s how it felt… and for a brief moment a sense of fear came over me:

The fear of having walked astray.

It was just so weird, because I thought that I’d always be able to lean on the actually free person and his words - as a point of reference. But as of now… and when this belief is gone, I no longer even have them as a sort of guiding light.

I have been walking in other people’s shoes. I have been reading other people’s maps. But as it seems… I’m now on my own… on a path into the unknown.

I’m curious of where my feet will lead me… :slightly_smiling_face:

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15

I have been thinking this quite literally when walking, and as a metaphor.

It’s like my feet are so far from the ‘action’ in my head and heart, that they are somehow closer to the actual world.

They are certainly very down to the ground.

As a metaphor too. It pretty easy to spot when I have a “foot in both camps” or more accurately, both feet in the ‘normal’, and a toe in actualism.

The striking thing is that when one’s feet are metaphorically both in the feel good actualism camp, all the rules don’t apply. There isn’t anyone to tell me what to do now.

My feet are a reminder of the decision to feel good, each moment again.

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16

Yesterday afternoon after work I wrote in my own diary:

“Exciting to see if I’ll make contact with the sadness of the abyss now that I’m off work for the weekend. I have felt better these past days, really ok acctually.”

I have just noticed that when I’m not occupied with the routine of everyday life, it starts to creep upon me - which was what happened today in the afternoon. Oh, yeah it also seems to be connected with another failure to make contact with this woman - because I’m just odd. It’s like I need these failures to poke a hole in old wounds… that never seem to heal…

I had to take a walk in the evening now since I really struggled to be my feelings. On my walk initially I felt very frustrated that I have yet to overcome this sadness:

“Why is this sadness still going on!?”
“why, why why!?”

It really took some time for me to see that I’m still fightning these feelings - that I don’t want to be them. That I’d like to escape to the fairy tale land of an actual freedom or some other fluff. I also just felt so worthless:

“How am a person like myself ever going to make it?”
“I might just kill myself.”

It took me an even longer time to calm down in my frustration/confusion and to be these feelings. When I after almost an hour got to that point, it was if the dark clouds opened up and on the night sky there were now small specks of lights… it was still dark… but the light from the stars… now had me feel a bit comfortable in my own misery.

Everything just wasn’t as dark anymore…

I mean it’s one thing to feel happier and happier and to be these feelings, but it’s another thing to fully be one’s darkest moments… and that’s what I’m up against. It just doesn’t make sense that someone interested in actualism has to do this, but I guess the traumas & difficulties of my life seem to have shaped me into some sort of gloomy ghoul - and this ghoul (my feelings) I must be, be, be. :slight_smile:

It’s like I’m climbing this terrible moutain and going through all kinds of hardships along the way… I musn’t lust or want to be anywhere but here (my feelings). I musn’t dream and try to see the moutain peak, shrouded among the clouds. I must keep my head down and immerse myself fully in the cold, in the rain, in the storm, in the aching of my wounded hands, in the soreness of every muscle in my body.

I must be this moment of being alive.

I have no clue to whenever I’m doing this right or not… I don’t think it matters much either… as long as I keep climbing.

I feel a bit ashamed writing about my struggles since I’d rather write about having success. Also I have this feeling that I don’t want to pollute this place with my ‘negativity’. More than anything I fear to be ‘wrong’ in the eyes of you all. But it is what it is.

I’d like to end this post on positive note: I just can’t see myself ever wanting to stop the ‘climb’. There’s something about the climb itself, that is intriguing even if I feel awful at times.

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17

Laying on my sofa doing nothing I had this insight:

That my thoughts are now going to be used as cues to me being occupied with escaping this moment of being alive - that I’m acctually fleeing whatever I’m feeling right now just by thinking alone!

I mean all of my thoughts are just utter nonsense, fantasies & mindgames, that I’m occupied with and most rarely (if ever lol) I’m thinking about an actual problem! This insight is really big and it will most likely have me even further immersed in this moment of being alive!

There’s no reason to think. No reason at all.

/The Ghoul

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18

@John

I’ve spent more moments sitting on the edge of that abyss wondering why I can’t get rid of it than I care to remember.

What came up a few months back was that the abyss itself is a belief.

The sadness etc are all there, but it doesn’t have actual depth. Everything in the psyche feels like it is a something, and we have all sorts of metaphors built-in by default, religion, society etc.

A few weeks back you made a pronouncement that you were going to feel good come what may.

There is another way of putting which Richard often uses, and I noticed it when I was working trying to get a report together of the trip I did to visit them 5 years ago.

Here is the excerpt;

"All that is needed to start, as it turns out, was what Richard said 10 days later at the airport “Feel good, each moment again”.

Well, that and apparently 10 years of drama to understand that was the whole point. As Vineeto comments on the AFT, " when one sets the intention to do this, one will have the drama needed, until one has had enough of it"

…

I started above with the single most important thing said as they turned to get back in their car;

“Feeling good, each moment again”

My notes from 5 years later;

There is actually a very subtle and important message in the grammar Richard has used here .

Each moment again.

It’s not “feeling good all the time”. That is subtly different. It implies that there is this big continuous “time” and the goal is to fill it with feeling good. Like a marathon, but no way to know how far it goes.

Each moment again, implies a decision too.

It implies a distinct, repeated action. It’s not a slog, an endurance, a chore which takes “time” to succeed.

It’s a moment of feeling good. Done again and again.

Richard has noted that “This moment has no duration”. It’s the same moment happening again, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s happening now.

The statement implies a continuous “fresh start”. Which he also states elsewhere, “Hey presto! Another opportunity to feel good”."

I will share the whole thing at some point, right now I am using it to process a lot of feelings and beliefs that arose but we’re never examined.

In a way, you are turning “being your feeling” into a method outside of what Richard meant by it.

You already are your feelings. It’s not a technique, it’s a premise and report from Richard that this is a fact of the psychological/ psychic self.

So, trying to be the sadness to get rid of the sadness is redundant. The sadness will go when you go.

Have you watched the download video excerpt on this page where Richard talks with Pamela about this exact point?

http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/library/topics/method.htm

In the meantime the method is to get back to feeling good. The advice that has been around for a while is don’t set your sights too high. Feeling good starts with the answer one might give in polite conversation “How are you?” “I am good, thanks” Ordinary, down to earth, and not hard to find.

The deep stuff won’t go away by focusing on one premise of actualism whilst ignoring the repeated on nearly every page exhortation in one guise or another commitment to feeling good.

The cool trick lately is there is a difference between the commitment and the outcome.

One can remember that commitment and drop whatever thoughts and rumination, and one is in fact back to feeling good in the ordinary, water-cooler “How are you Larry” kind of way.

From there, one can gently let something of what is automatically going to come back ( the previous thoughts, feelings, abyss whatever).

Something better will happen in your thinking in that first minute.

Then, you will start to feel less than good.

Stop and remember the commitment.

One is then feeling good again.

Then the thoughts and feelings return. One can get a few quality minutes of decent insight thinking in before blame, one-sided victim stuff, regret, resentment tinged thinking returns.

Stop and remember the commitment.

One is then feeling good again.

Then carry on.

Over the last while, I have done this exact thing for 3 or 4 hours at a time. Found myself in tears over the tragedy that my ex-wife and I never got even the entree to the love dream. Feeling that sadness was important, because all I had ever felt was anger and blame with a of course I wasn’t perfect tacked on the end.

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19

Making that moment to moment decision to return one’s thinking back to that ordinary “feeling good, thanks” place.

All the issues will return in seconds, but the difference is your thinking is now closer to your native intelligence, and in doing this, that place in your mind has the high ground.

Make the issues come to a feeling good you, don’t go to them and become a feeling bad you.

One of these works in hours to sort something out, one of these never works at all.

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20

It’s not really thinking that is the problem, but the thinking self. The thinking self or Ego/SI often tries to interfere with your feelings, tries to moderate or manipulate them constantly.

This distinction is important, because you will need thinking to connect the right dots and end beliefs, false concepts etc. Otherwise they will go on forever and a day.

But I get what you want to convey here.

21

Which is why engaging that “thinking self or Ego/SI” in remembering the ironclad, bold lettered commitment to feeling good.

Otherwise it’s just going to be an absolute uphill slog putting stars in the darkness of that abyss.

Once that commitment is in place, and not even particularly worrying about feeling any better than OK to start with, go and do something else. Get a “I’m good, thank Larry” level of feeling good going, then…

Neither express or repress that feeling that will inevitably still be there. Then we are poking holes from the top, metaphorically speaking, rather than having the “thinking ego self” immersed in the darkness.

I am loving the metaphor of that commitment being a stake I drove into the ground and then to have tethered my “thinking ego self” to it.

The metaphor works quite well if you plan on exploring abysses.

The first rule when getting stuck in a hole is to stop digging.

The temptation which has been why here I am 10 years later is to “skip the boring bit” and get digging!

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22

I’m happy Andrew that you saw through the belief of the abyss on your ‘lunch break’ a few months ago. :slight_smile: I almost wish that I had done that too when I was going through this experience at the peak of it’s intensity. Here experiencing feelings that the common man is forever locked out from ever experiencing - stuff that I in my wildest imagination never could have dreamt of ever feeling. The excruciating pain of the soul sometimes taken to such extremes, that I was stunned…flabbergasted… that it was even possible to experience what I was going through… and to still be alive… it was unreal… My ordeal was so severe that I couldn’t even relate to other people’s accounts of dark nights et al., seeing what they had gone through sounded like a sunday picnic - a sort of joke.

It was a very very real experience… more real than anything before and after in my entire life. It was as real as the souls thirst for love and my craving for oneness with God. Divine love… Which is also an entierly different ball game than the concept of romantic love I’ve seen discussed in another thread.

The craving for oneness…. to merge with another me in the act of union… Love… (this still saddens me and brings a tear to my eye… that I lack this.).

The spiritual side of things seems to be closely knit to the very core of one’s being and thus I pray… that I too… one day will be able to see through these phenomena as easily as you did on that day when having an ‘eureka moment’ at lunch. :wink:

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23

@John I say so much that I don’t remember saying it being at lunch, but it was definitely something which had the effect of taking the teeth out of the abyss. It was tied into the whole religious upbringing which had created an Abyss out of maybe a normal abyss. Or maybe all abysses are the same and I just wanted mine to be a special one.

You know, for reasons.:rofl:

I am curious, have you been exposed to Christianity growing up?

24

I agree, but there is another combination available.

The above is really not important if pure intent is active and working. That remembrance is replaced by an intimate knowing.

From this position it is absolutely fine to be/indulge in the sadest emotions possible, because they happen in front of a perfect and pure background so to speak. All feelings, no matter how profound, happen in a stable velocity, without the danger of spiraling into something completely absurd.
With pure intent + not repressing nor expressing all emotions inevitably cease after a while and change into something other. It’s like a battery that has to discharge. After the discharge one can look closer into it = thinking/making connections

I can hardly remember a time where pure intent was not active, not a given. So I have to be careful with my advice regarding how to operate without it.
Is it a sensible approach to be one’s feelings completely without that background?
I really don’t know.

25

Yes, that has been my thinking, that this approach to seperating out the decision itself as a metaphorical “stake in the ground” with be replaced by the connection to pure intent, when I can make it. Hopefully soon.

I particularly like your description here. I will link it over to thread I started on the topic.

26

I would say that it was a 10 year lunch break. As whatever moment of seeing happened when I began to contemplate that the perceived depth was imaginary, was preceded by 10 years of actualism interest, and 36 years of life before that.

Which is why, if you can short cut any need for prayer with your own commitment (as you had already seen and made weeks ago), that hoped for “seeing through” will be very soon.

Not to say prayers wouldn’t work, in that any intention with enough repetition would do the trick. It would be a case of misappropriation when the “miracle” came, but the main thing is it came.

It’s already a miracle you are here, with a bit of magic and self-made luck, who knows just how good your life will be. :rofl:

27

No. I don’t think that you get what I mean. My insight acctually includes the things you’re saying is a ‘good thing’.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life having the realizations coming from trying to untie the ‘knots’ within myself which I’ve come to believe that I need to solve, before I can take the next step on my path.

Alan seemed comfortable doing this… Always looking for ‘shiny rocks’ to study along the way. As he found these ‘rocks’ or so called ‘problems’ (right dots/beliefs/false concepts) he took an comfortable pause, sat down by side of the road and spent his time studying these interesting rocks (right dot/beliefs/false concepts). I still remember this one time, after all those years, when he still got childishly excited and felt that he had to write a post about him not enjoying watching the Television.

How silly isn’t that? :joy:

I believe more in the approach of freedom has no conditions. Whatever belief/concept etc. that’s lost along the way, will be lost in due time and by itself (as happened when I stoped crying about my dead mother). How many ‘shiny rocks’ is one to collect and discard before one is set free? No. I’m not at all interested in rocks laying around along the way.

I want to feel… and I want to further immerse myself in this moment of being alive. That’s all I want. I’m not a Rubik’s cube to be solved… before I go…

28

Dear diary

Yesterday I nipped something in the bud. Haha, this is really some beginners actualism - but yay I actually did it!

What’s noteworthy is that it all happened automatically. “I” wasn’t even involved in it - it happened just like that. Thus it’s not like “I” was looking for something to nip in the bud or even had this concept in my mind at all. It just happened… I don’t remember exactly what it was. But I remember the thoughts: “same old same old” and the feeling and everything that came with it - got halted at the ‘door step’ - vanished and was gone.

This is what I want… this is truly what I want: Things happening by themselves. To me it’s all about bringing an end to this “I” trying to stay in control ‘watching’ and telling “me” what to do or not to do. I don’t need this daddy “I” and all his seriousness anymore. :slight_smile:

Now let me speak of some other matters. Serious matters.

There has been some turmoil going on in my journal lately. This dude named @Andrew has raised alot of criticism against me. This old fella is really onto me with his morals and keeps spamming my journal like a proselyt maniac.

Psst! Don’t tell him but I think much of what he writes are missinterpretations of my texts. I don’t want to start an endless argument so I’ll refrain from pointing out his errors. :slight_smile:

But…I’ll say this. Both Andrew and others, seem to object to me being my feelings. They seem to object to me wanting nothing else but to be my feelings (Sounds silly right? :joy:) Like I’m doing something wrong here… and that bad feelings are to be avoided and shunned. It’s almost as if I’m adviced to cry “wolf!” and run for the “feeling good hills” when this happens!

No!

Because what the naysayers don’t realize… is the absolute freedom I’m enjoying. They can’t see that I’m totally ‘off the hook’ from trying to achieve anything. I have no pressure whatsoever to feel anything else but whatever I’m feeling right now. They can’t see that when I actually feel better at times, it happens by itself and because I want to feel something else… and not because some actualist moral and this master “I” is telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing.

I’m sorry to say to all you naysayers: But I can hardly wait for another episode of the Dark night of the soul… and against Andrews thinking, I’m gonna do it guys! I’m gonna let myself fall down into the darkness of the abyss… and I’m going to be hurting and crying and I’m going to be down there… when it happens… when those stars reappears on the night sky…

Promise. :wink:

Now you might say: “What about my intent?” When I’ve felt bad as much as I have done. Unlike Andrew who says he needs to “stop and remember the commitment”. I neither stop in the middle of the road picking up ‘shiny rocks’ nor do I remind myself… of that very day… when I in all of my deepest sincerity wrote about my intent for the very first time. To me those words aren’t some biblical commandment that I need to shove down my own throat, everytime I happen to fall down into the darkness. No… I need no reminders… or intellectual cues about my intent…

I live it.

29

I pose the following to be sure I understand you well:

Not having any pressure to feel a particular way (bad, good, even felicitous), rather than how you are feeling each moment, is giving you an absolute freedom (as you are “off the hook” from trying to achieve anything); and you are enjoying this freedom.

So right now you might be feeling bad. Since you don’t want to feel any other way than the way you feel (bad), nor try to achieve anything other than be that feeling, this makes you feel free; and this feeling of freedom brings you enjoyment.

So is it correct to say that in that case you feel bad AND you enjoy it at the same time, due to the sensation of freedom that being feeling bad produces in you?

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30

Thank you for your sincere effort of trying to understand me.

I think you’re correct… even though I struggle a little to interpret that last verse of yours. I think this [struggle] has more to do with the process being quite new to me - which means that the ‘freedom’ I’m refering too isn’t with me all the time. Hence and even if my post make it seem so - I’m definately not clear on everything yet. I mean it took me almost an hour to fully be my feelings the other day. But I think it’s fair to say that when I succeed in being my feelings fully, there’s a sort of oneness to it… a oneness which also seem to carry the qualities of freedom and enjoyment.

There’s still an “I” here which means that the old man still keeps interfering with my naiveté and this sensation of freedom. It’s the absence of this “I” and the begining of oneness that brings forth this free sensation and what also seems to be enjoyment.

31

Oh, I think I understand you better now.

To try to understand a little more, I ask you the following about this part:

Knowing that when you are your feelings there is a kind of oneness, could you describe in more detail what differences do you experience (perceive, feel -emotionally-, feel -physically-; whatever you think is appropriate to convey the state better) between the moments when you succeed in being your feelings and, for example, the rest of that hour when you did not?

Probably this query is more difficult to answer/describe/put into words; do as much as you can/want, of course.

32

What you ask of me has bothered me quite a bit and I have up until now wraped my mind around this more than I’d like… I did so because I’d like to please you with an answer. I’m sorry to disappoint… but I just don’t get the words to describe it better than I did - no matter how much I try to think about the matter.

My mind is sort of blank.

If this is something I’d ever feel like answering. I’d might get back to you in the future when my experience has matured a bit more.