Journal de Henry

I’m so glad that I’m doing all this!

I know it may not look like I’m ‘living the dream’ to others, but I’ve long been one to poke & prod & wander in my own feelings. I’m getting to do something I’m good at, and I’m having success with it. What could be better than that?

There’s no way to know, because from where ‘you’ are now, you can only see answers generated by yourself

When you’re different - one way or another - reality will look completely different, and the answers generated will be different.

And when there’s no ‘you’ at all to generate reality - what then?

We just have to start from the reality where we are - demolition from the inside.

I’ve just realized - getting approval requires satisfying the narratives of others. It’s not even something I want.

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Yesterday I remembered you because I had an EE while peeing :smiley:. It must have lasted about half an hour (the state, not the pee :smile:).

I happened to be leaving a bar and decided to stop by the bathroom because I had a long walk ahead of me. I had been reading physics, felt good, but nothing special. At the urinal I was looking at the tiles on the wall and a metal plate with screws in it. Suddenly the plate and screws became sharper, I looked curiously at their grooves which now seemed more delineated and deeper, the colors of the tiles became more vivid and when I noticed the field of vision was widening I thought “Oh, it’s happening…”; and “This is what Henry was saying!” :smiling_face:.

Although it wasn’t a PCE, I then stared at myself for quite some time in the mirror with a blank face but with some curiosity and strangeness that THAT body was apparently “me”. The strangeness was not complete because “me” was there, it had not disappeared as in a PCE, but its weakening was enough to perceive a separation/strangeness between that body and the emotions/identity that moments ago were “attached” to it.

The experience had many more aspects but I wanted to highlight it was the first time an EE started peeing, so there may indeed be an element to investigate in that! :sweat_smile:

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Actually that would be a great thread candidate - “weirdest entries into EEs/PCEs :smiley:

So far my hen party PCE was probably the weirdest one, we’ve had the peeing, someone must ‘push’ for the number 2 now :poop::stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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THE PEE-PCE IS REAL!!!

There’s a meme I’ve seen before where it’s just a photo of a corner of a grungy bathroom, and the caption is something like “I just love this world, everything is so amazing” and the spirit of the meme is meant to be sarcastic, but the original picture is a Snapchat and I think the guy was being sincere and having a PCE in that grungy bathroom

Pee-PCEs are a great reminder that perfection is everywhere :slight_smile:

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The method is going pretty well

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Well, I think I recounted my experience with seeing the whole “belief in God” structure crumbling while I was on the loo… so… :grin:

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I’ve been using @Josef’s description of unifying to get a more sincere ‘decision’ to feel good

So rather than trying to ‘decide’ to feel good via the ‘actualist’ side of myself trying to tell the ‘bad’/‘feeling’ part of myself to ‘cut it out’ and get back to feeling good (while also using some convoluted/complex description of why I should), the aim is to 100% commit to feeling however I’m feeling, and from that position feeling good becomes a natural option.

This has been working even better than expected:

What it has looked like so far has been that I’ll realize I’m not feeling good, and then I’ll say “Oh! Time to put Josef’s approach into practice.” and then I’ll take a second to pinpoint exactly how I was feeling, so I can commit to it and really get into it and then that decision can happen from a sincere place.

But then I can’t… because I can already see that it would be silly to feel that way. I can’t even get back into the feeling. By the time it’s anything like a conscious decision, I have no interest in feeling that way at all. And just like that, one trigger has lost its strength.

Pretty neat.

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It’s interesting how much can happen if only I fully feel this thing!

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Yes, I am also having good results with this. What I’m finding is that I do an insane amount of moralizing and should-ing on how I should feel. Once I relax that and allow myself to feel the feeling instead of trying to destroy it, I become unified. And funnily enough this relaxes me and feeling good then arises naturally as an option, like you said. For that I’ve had to work through fears about feeling a bad feeling, such as “what if I never feel good again” or “what if this bad feeling ruins my interactions” or “what if this is completely the wrong approach”

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It’s actualism 101, which until now, I hadn’t seen at all.

It really does work. The more I am completely honest and feel the easier the decision happens.

It does seem to happen. The automatic pattern matching of intelligence sorting through to the optimal decision seems to depend on a unified ‘me’.

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It’s funny isn’t, all the words are there, it’s all laid out concise and clear and yet there is this weird phenomenon that happens where the various 'I’s manage to tangle it all up into some unworkable mess! I do it all the time haha.

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Doing a bit more of this ‘committing to the emotion 100%’ last night and the emotions began to increasingly appear false, and it occurred to me that emotions / ‘I’ am false, I’m just added on top of whatever situation my body is in.

For example if somebody does something that annoys me (aka ‘I’ become annoyed), the annoyed feeling doesn’t really add anything useful to the situation, I can easily make good decisions without the annoyed feeling there at all. The annoyed feeling is there for 2 reasons, to make ‘me’ do things (in the case of annoyance being an extension of anger, it would be to attack), and to make others do things (in that they respond to my emotion). I was reminded of these lizards who instinctively flash their neck display to scare predators when in trouble:

So we’re all running around flashing signals that make both us and others uncomfortable constantly.

Anger = threatening violence, sad = hoping to be comforted (protected), loving = keeping others close for protection, compassionate = protecting others of the group (again to keep the group safe).

These are all occurring 100% automatically-instinctively, it was only when I began attempting to have these emotions on purpose that their ephemeral nature became apparent.

I can see that the emotion grabs the attention of this body and drives it toward those particular actions, it literally overtakes my senses and places my awareness into predetermined thought-loops with predetermined ends & actions.

Whenever I said ‘no thank u’ and exited the emotion & related thought-loop, I found my senses once again directed to the present moment and what is physically around me. This is where everything is happening.

Every time I live as ‘me,’ emotionally, I’m choosing to reject this physical current-moment and play out an imaginative escapade. Of course it escapes my attention that these imagined escapades have a laughably low success rate (as in, a response appropriate to the situation), as I’m too busy living the emotion to notice anything else.

I’m perfectly capable of taking care of any and all situations without these automatic reactions needing to step in and force my hand.

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This interaction seems to explain the belief in / experience of a ‘God’ as well.

Who is grabbing my attention and sending me toward particular actions, particular patterns of thought?

From the point of view of a divided self, it seems to be out of my control, something that is happening to me, something I try to fight against but cannot

A God or gods seems to explain the situation neatly, since it does not seem to be ‘me’ doing it.

It’s only with the recognition that it is always me, that one can come to one’s senses - or, have the realization that one is God, and zoom away on a power trip.

Something I’ve noticed about this ‘committing to the emotion 100%’ is that it forces me to focus on just one emotion, which helps on a couple of fronts.

Normally we follow a chain of emotions, with each reacting to the previous. This is what makes it possible for ‘me’ to maintain, because ‘I’ can’t just have one emotion all the time. So I cycle.

For example, earlier I was reminded of my ex and I felt a pang of fear, followed by sorrow, followed by worry that I’ll feel that way for a long time. Ironically, I had already moved on from the sorrow - to worry!

Another example might be feeling anger, followed by remorse, followed by sorrow about the remorse, followed by worry about the sorrow, followed by anger…

When I pick whichever emotion from that chain and consciously ‘be’ it, I soon find that that emotion cannot maintain itself for long. Some have more ‘staying power’ than others, but pretty soon, I lose interest. Even something that a moment ago seemed of earth-shattering importance!

This has greatly helped me stop ‘believing’ in the emotions… if it’s so important, why can’t I keep feeling that way? Even when I am consciously trying to feel it? The circumstances haven’t changed, but my emotion fades away pretty quickly.

Also by focusing on one emotion at a time rather than letting the chain play out, when the particular emotion fades away, it’s mainly replaced by delight (wow, that didn’t have much staying power at all) and satisfaction of a job well done - I could have just gone along the emotion-chain as usual, but this time I remembered to pin it.

Normally, ‘I’ find whatever emotion quite unpleasant and will do anything to get away from it - which really means hopping to the next emotion - and ‘finding something unpleasant’ is an emotion in itself. By committing to something 100%, I’m choosing to stay there, to look at it. It has a similar character to Richard’s describing taking back his autonomy. By my own autonomous choice, I’m embodying this or that emotion. And by making that choice, I have an interest in it, rather than trying to escape. It’s the perfect opportunity to learn things about the emotion, and about how ‘I’ operate - it’s hard to make observations when running away from something.

Last night I also observed ‘me’ being ‘blank,’ which almost seems like a different category of emotion - dissociation. It appears it’s something I learned to do to ‘cope’ with the emotion, but it also keeps them at a distance, where it’s impossible to commit to them 100% and thus reap all these benefits. The first thing I had to do was remove this ‘cover’ of blankness.

With committing 100% to the emotion, some lasted longer than others, but each time I arrived at a similar conclusion: it became obviously pointless to continue feeling that way.

Because normally we enter the emotion-chain, each emotion is avoided and rushed to the next reactive one, but with staying in the one (and committing to it), it quickly becomes obvious that the emotion is not achieving anything beyond making myself (and others) uncomfortable.

In a moment I can be mad at my friend because of something he did, but by saying “ok, I’m going to be REAL MAD for AWHILE” it began to feel pretty silly just sitting there seething and doing nothing. Me seething doesn’t do anything to change his behavior for the better. Might as well stop being angry…

Feeling good exits that whole scene, because feeling good is inherently enjoyable and is also beneficial for my actions - and the people around me, and humanity as a whole. That is worth committing 100% to.

This is all going very well :slight_smile:

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Incidentally, this is why ‘actualist morality’ doesn’t work to become free - ‘being’ the ‘correct authority’ finger-wagging at oneself for feeling the wrong way is not the same thing as feeling good. It’s just another link in the emotion-chain. And ‘I’ live to be sneaky another day…

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It’s not even the same thing as feeling [whatever is being felt]. Period.

It is good to keep in mind that moral values were generated evolutionarily and persist largely to twist/override instinctive emotions (and its consequent behaviours) considered harmful in various contexts and times, and to foster others considered beneficial.

So, methodologically speaking, it is likely that the biggest problem of a morality is how quickly it takes over by overriding an “undue” emotion (generating a “due” one, diverting attention, etc.) preventing us from fully feeling and observing what is present and who “I” am.

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11|13|22

An interesting couple of days, I’ve gone on a date with a girl and we got along really well, the first day we talked for 3 hours about all kinds of things, and then hung out more later in the day. She’s a remarkably naive, independent, and happy person.

I found that my emotions varied, at different points I was delighted by her, at other times I found things to niggle about. I also found that I felt very negatively whenever she would get nervous, which is something I’m looking to keep an eye on. I’ve had difficulty in the past when others were awkward in any way, I’d often blame it on myself. So when it’s a date, that’s even more heightened. It’s nice to see it this clearly.

Today we hung out again and we were both more relaxed since we’d gotten to know eachother a bit, and I had been investigating that nervousness issue over the evening and this morning.

I mentioned at one point going to Australia and she asked what my reasons for going were, and the cat was out of the bag - I found myself in that old familiar situation of describing the PCE and actualism for the first time to someone.

It went surprisingly well, I think I’ve loosened up a lot about hoping for a certain kind of reception from that. And she actually was pretty interested and agreed with a lot of the points. She couldn’t remember a PCE, but she’s similarly in a place where she’s looking to be more free, less dependent on ‘normal’ ways of being. She could see the sense in being happier.

There was also something interesting, at one point I told her about how I had a little brother that died a decade ago, and how that had in many ways spurred me to get to the point where actualism made sense, where I’m chasing something beyond the normal. And her father had died at a young age and had had a similar impact on her. It reminded me of how many of the pioneering actualists had been through something like that, that changed them and made it worth it to them to push beyond the normal.

Anyway it’s pretty encouraging. It’s also not lost on me that I’ve met this person at a point where I’ve started to be doing really well, most days are really good now, even the ‘down’ days are ‘just good.’ This date working out doesn’t feel to me like it has to work out, which is new for me, and it lends the whole thing a relaxed air. I spent a good chunk of our time together today in excellence, on the edge of PCE. Pretty neat.

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11|15|22

Transitioned into feeling stress about this new girl pretty much immediately, with two facets of having critical/doubting feelings (is she good enough?) and fears of losing her (am I good enough?).

This is all familiar territory from my previous relationship, I’m taking the approach of just dropping the fears. All my worries don’t really do anything to change the outcome anyway (other than making everything stressful of course). Maybe she will reject me, maybe at some future time I’ll break up, but I can’t know that right now and it doesn’t really matter anyway. I’ve already (re)proven to myself over the last month that I can really enjoy myself as a single person, so that is useful.

It’s been really cool seeing how similar the hangups are with the others posting about relationship stuff @Andrew @Josef @Kub933

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