John

[Miguel]

@John

And even more important: My moments attempting to apply the method must increase. This is like an active component that’s easily forgotten about, thinking that awareness of one’s feelings alone is enough - when it’s not (If this thinking does make sense, to any of you more experienced practioners!?)

HAIETMOBA is clearly not the method.

At least it makes sense to me: awareness of one’s feelings alone is not enough. What might be missing then to feel good on a more continuous basis?

Three elements (there were more) that helped me:

• wanting to feel good (happy and harmless at the end)
• wanting to be here and now
• pure intent.

Since pure intent derives from experiencing PCEs, let’s leave it aside because I understand you haven’t experienced them yet (hence your comment about “sincere intent” in Kuba’s journal).

So for a long time two of the biggest problems I faced on a daily basis practicing AF were not wanting to feel good/better by myself when I felt bad/worse, and not wanting to be here and now (wanting to be somewhere else/at another time, and a semi-permanent feeling of general rejection for this world) by myself.

So the practice of HAIETMOBA had a limit of effectiveness to feel good because when I managed to become aware of unpleasant emotional states I did not want to suffer them (because they felt unpleasant, of course, and unpleasantness is aversive) but often I also found myself not wanting to change that state by myself.

Although I understood (perhaps wrongly) that you don’t want to read any more AFT material, let me quote these two short excerpts somewhat related to both issues:

VINEETO: […] And yes, you will find that it is initially hard work to feel good or feel happy for extended periods of time as you will find a myriad of excuses and so-called justified reasons for being annoyed, feeling sad, being bored and so on. This is why understanding that this moment is the only moment you can experience being alive is vitally important because then you will be less inclined to waste this moment by frittering it away by not feeling good about being here. You are here anyway, and it is now, and it can only ever be now, so why not make it your business to enjoy being here?
V – Actual Freedom Mailing List Correspondent # 48

RESPONDENT: Now I have some questions for you. ‘Why you want to be happy and harmless?
RICHARD: As I do not want to be happy and harmless I cannot answer your question … I have been here, in the perfection of this actual world, all along simply having a ball.
In other words: it was the identity within who desired happiness and harmlessness … and ‘he’ desired it like ‘he’ had never desired anything before.
RESPONDENT: Is this not a desire?
RICHARD: It was for the identity within … ‘twas the mother of all desires, in fact.
Selected Correspondence: Hedonism & Anhedonia

Ths is because I remembered that you had said some things about those two issues:

@John

I think that for those like me, having little experience of anything that feels good […]

@John

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.

@John

My intent certainly isn’t a feeling… So my choice of words: “that’s how it feels” is only making reference to this intent… which isn’t a feeling at all. It would only be at false if I were to find a grain of motivation, desire, drive… feeling… in it. These phenomena still occurs, but my own attempts of doing anything are immediately dropped when seeing the silliness of trying to go back to that of ‘my old ways’.

So from what I have read from your writings you have an intention to be happy and harmless (even if it does not derive from a PCE; it doesn’t matter) and, therefore, also to feel good. But as far as I understand it, you don’t want to feel good by “your” means: you want it to happen by itself.

So I understand that you don’t want to perform tasks/take deliberate actions that, at least, make you feel good feelings more often; neither do you want to take actions that deliberately tend to generate felicitous feelings. You want them to happen by themselves by merely observing/feel/ (or even being) your feelings.

I assume (because as far as I know you have not referred to this issue from this perspective) that the same happens to you regarding being here and now at every moment (and may be in this world in general): that you do not want it to happen, but that it happens by itself as a product of observing/feeling/being your feelings

Although I didn’t delve into why I so often didn’t want to feel good and/or be here and now (and in this world in general) by my own means -despite my dislike and whishing to feel better somehow-, if what I observed/wrote about your words is more or less correct, those MIGHT be two of the differences (pure intention aside, I repeat) that separate you from the success (relatively speaking) you perceive in others, which indeed it’s not exclusively due to the ability to merely apply HAIETMOBA.