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.