What I’m looking for is enjoying them for whatever they are in that moment regardless of their anxiety in a moment, forgetting my love-narrative, my ‘hotness’ narrative, my sex-life narrative, my conversational narratives, and my beliefs that it’s important for them to be interested in actualism. What is this person, that I’m meeting for the first time in each moment?
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It reads to me that (as you mentioned in the cannibalism thread) you are using the girls to fill a void within yourself. I wonder if you are doing something similar to what I was doing with the fear of death here - working these feelings into a narrative of what it means to be an identity, whereas I get a sense it might be something that’s more particular to you and therefore it might be possible to remove it more or less completely now.
Is the Henry who is trying to have all these cool encounters the one who feels/believes deeply that he
is uncool? That there is a piece missing that needs to be fixed, that only if you do A,B,C that you would prove to yourself and others that you can be ‘that’.
Is it possible that there is a deeply ingrained insecurity here causing this whole escapade? Like a mission to prove to the world that you are not broken after all?
Congrats on your newfound success! It was similar for me — no or very little/random luck in dating, and then lots of dating. The latter is certainly more fun!
From reading this, it appears you’re distancing yourself from these ‘critical feelings’ while endorsing the loving feelings.
Look at how you describe them differently in this paragraph: “‘I’ want to simply be in love with them” and “[I] imagine that I can feel lovingly forever and a day”… as opposed with “at different junctures there are critical feelings”, i.e. a 3rd person passive voice for the ‘critical feelings’ vs. first-person active for the loving ones.
That being said earlier you did write it as “me feeling critically toward them” so it’s not like this is an “admissible in court evidence” 
but it maybe reveals an underlying psychic structure.
Actually the more revealing aspect is how you wrote that you wanted to feel the loving feelings, but you omitted that you wanted to feel the critical feelings, and indeed from what you wrote it seems like you apparently don’t want to feel those feelings.
With that in mind, it would make sense that what is confusing is that you feel like you only want the loving feelings and not the critical ones — yet even though you feel that way, the thing to realize is that you want to feel the critical ones too! That’s why you are feeling them — it’s because, in those particular situations and circumstances when you felt that way, you decided (whether consciously and methodically or habitually and subconsciously doesn’t matter per se) that that was the appropriate way to feel at the time.
The trick of course is that ‘I’ come as a package. Feelings are just the way that ‘I’ exist in the world. And the loving feelings, just like the critical ones, are self-aggrandizing — it is ‘me’ feeling that way (ultimately nothing to do with the other person). So by going down the loving feeling route you are choosing to endorse ‘you’ and ‘yourself’ as ‘you’ are expressing ‘yourself’ with how ‘you’ feel is appropriate, which means that… when you don’t like something you will feel something negative!
And if it be impossible that ‘I’ am to blame — which is the default assumption for everybody — then the negative feelings are evidence that something is wrong with the other person… and are therefore justified! “If only ‘she’ were this way or ‘she’ didn’t say that, then I would have continued feeling these loving feelings…” So then it’s easy to set about trying to control and manipulate her into an imagined perfect foil for your love.
The solution of course is already well-known around these parts — it’s to, with great discernment and careful self-evaluation, experientially learn to distinguish between the intimacy of the loving feelings and the intimacy of the sincere/naive ones, and go down the sincere/naive intimacy route, which will lead to ‘you’ allowing ‘yourself’ to release ‘your’ grip on consciousness and lead to increased near-actual intimacy (an IE) which can also lead to a PCE, and in any case will further you down the path to self-immolating once and for all!
Cheers,
Claudiu
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Wow thanks @claudiu this is big! My brain right now is going 
So you say I want to feel the bad feelings as much as I do the good ones? It can’t be so simple… can it? 
So you mean for years I have fought myself? By splitting away from certain parts and aggrandising others?
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This is really so simple I can’t believe I never saw it so clearly! 
I can see this on 2 levels right now :
One one level I want to be the bad feelings, why? Because they allow me to sustain the good ones. E.g by worrying about what I am doing tomorrow I get to feel the security of having a plan. I can really see this in operation in myself, the energy of the bad literally feeding the good and vice versa, in fact this is just 1 energy that is ‘me’, continually shifting.
On a second level I want to be the bad feelings (just as much as I want to be the good feelings) because they sustain the drama that is ‘me’. Those 2 sides of the coin are needed to continually fabricate reality.
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Actually there seems a third reason for why I would choose to feel bad - because of belief. I think this is more inline with what @claudiu is writing about.
As in by the time I am feeling bad there must have been a decision made on some level that this was the appropriate way to feel given the circumstances. But as there is never an actual reason to feel bad it will revert back to belief.
I can see now that I feel critically because I’m trying to find someone who is ‘good enough for me.’
That’s lovely, but I don’t think there’s anyone that exists that I wouldn’t be able to find something to criticize. Especially because one of the most common things I have a problem with is when they start to feel anxious or annoyed… so then I’m looking for someone who is already free. Good luck!
I remember when I was first having significant adult PCEs around 2017, one of the first things I started doing was ‘looking for the others’
At first I imagined there must be many others, who were discreetly ‘playing it cool’ in normal society
But as I went about talking with people, even meeting with an exclusive spiritual group, it became clear that it was the opposite: hardly anyone at all was living the PCE, if anyone.
One of the best moments of my life was the day I found the actual freedom site… finally! Here were people who could describe the PCE and were living it. It made sense with my experience that there were only a few people.
But I can see that I’ve held onto finding more people, wanting to believe that there are more people who have ‘figured it out,’ and are living the PCE.
Forgetting of course that I’m not even living the PCE… at one time I had many PCEs, and then rather than becoming free myself, I occupied my attention with looking for others.
I’m glad I’m able to put all this together now. It took this long, but it’s these kinds of things that have kept me going in these circles.
Now I have a much more accurate survey of the psychic landscape, having met and spoken with so many more people.
Per your observation @claudiu, as I’ve felt critically this morning, and as it recurs, I’m going to be looking for how I really do want to be feeling that way. I’m trying to get something done, and the question is, is that the best way to get it done? Do I even want to do that?
And as you mention, it is self-aggrandizing… she just exists, it is only because I think I am on some throne that I cast the emotional judgments.
The flaws in my judgments are apparent in that I haven’t ever achieved the ends I fantasize about. Only by accepting that I’m making those judgments and owning them will I be able to see what I’m doing and what the real downsides of them are.
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Yes there is some element of this, I have a picture in my head of what my life should look like and it includes women / a woman.
And then once that is included, it also includes her doing certain things, being certain ways, and also having a certain appearance. With that laundry list, it’s inevitable that some things will fall short.
In any case, I’m starting out from where I am now, with a general sense of distaste / disappointment about my life, and aiming to get ‘over there’ where I imagine that I will feel good, once the right situation has been attained. ‘Over here,’ I am not cool. ‘Over there,’ I am.
This also relies on other people perceiving me and thinking that I’m cool, something which cannot work in practice because of others’ critical natures.
I’d do well to heed Richard’s advice that freedom can only happen now.
Regardless of whether I’m seeing anyone or not, and regardless of the appearance, actions, or way-of-being of those people, freedom can and will happen now.
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I have been underrating the impact that guilt has here
A lot of criticism could also be called critique - essentially intelligent evaluation.
It only makes sense that as I’m dating I’m taking a look at someone and figuring out what’s up with them, and some things I like and some things I’m looking for something else.
But with my subtly christian upbringing, there are morals to not judge anyone, to always think positively of others. With that thought jumping in, it’s not acceptable to find fault with others. This handicaps that ability to be intelligently critical, which of course means it comes back twice as strong later, with heavier feelings attached.
If I simply allow myself to evaluate others, while enjoying them, myself, and the whole situation, then there isn’t any problem.
Sure I’ll sometimes hang out with people that I don’t like everything about, but that’s no surprise. How could they check all the boxes of everything I’m looking for? And sure, sometimes I’ll decide I don’t actually want to be around someone. That only makes sense, and it’s up to them how they live their lives in that circumstance - I’m not doing anything terrible ‘to them.’
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There’s another implication of this, which is no longer using others’ evaluations of myself (most often predicated on beliefs and emotions) and using my own judgment of what I think is best to do
From this perspective, most of the time others’ opinions of my actions become irrelevant, with the understanding that I’ll still consider the validity of others’ observations.
The primary belief was that everyone is somehow the same, and that I was to ‘find a way to appreciate them’ as if they were the same. Different people have different qualities, which are relevant…
I just got a draft of some long-lost sweetness
at some point 1.5-2 years ago I resolved to stop expecting as much from others, but that decision was predicated on the above guilt-complex. With that decision, I closed myself off from using my own discernment to determine what I wanted, what I liked, and what I didn’t like.
The wilderness I live in is apparent now
My view these days is we can’t find what we are looking for in others because it is an experience of ourselves we are looking for.
I am the One I am longing for. An experience of a naive me, a joyful and interested me.
I’ve been listening to Lewis Capaldi on repeat these days. Every song is about longing for an ex. However, I realised that I don’t have an ex that these songs could relate to. Neither probably does Lewis.
They are spiritual songs. Like the Muslim Sufi music I put in the music thread, or the Christian music I used to write.
It’s a longing for ,as Richard says, “being right here, now”.
Loneliness isn’t because we are alone, but that we are not “right here, right now”, enjoying life in a way we either clearly or vaguely remember we once did.
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So it’s natural that, as you say Henry, if someone we spend time with isn’t “living the PCE” we notice this. Just about every “judgement” we could make about others could be filed this way.
Then, as you say, it really comes down to our preference. Do I like this aspect of this person enough to live with the aspects I don’t like?
Which, is a choice we do get to make.
The kicker is when we look into ourselves. We have a choice about changing what we don’t like, but there is no choice about living with it if we don’t change.
Which simplifies everything. Choice becomes a matter of finding out as much about what purpose the other is persuing, what makes them tick, and whether that will be conducive to one’s own naive enjoying of today.
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I appreciate these open conversations about relationships. 
@claudiu said something earlier that the very action of relating is aggrandizing in itself… I think I’m so important that it’s important that I categorize how someone exists in relation to me. What??
It’s an imaginative game I play to convince myself of my place in an imagined hierarchy…
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Right.
I am currently building scale models of tanks. Something I used to do as a pre-teen. It never occurred to me then why such a thing was enjoyable. I just liked the process of building things. The precision, the power of the object the model represents.
Each moment back then had no conscious reference to another.
It was me and the feeling of creating these powerful objects that would belong to me.
Another person is entirely different to this scenario. A conscious entity can’t be constructed to suit the image of the model. It is whatever it already is, and will change for no-one!
So choice is everything. We can choose to spend time with them, we can choose to try and convince them of various things, if we want.
That is something we can do. We can’t actually change them however. Even the most cunning of manipulators never gets what they want.
I was reflecting earlier on the Australian saying “She’ll be right” earlier.
I have no idea where it came from, but I chose to think it embodies a certain amount of common sense. Ultimately, “she” will have to work out whatever she needs to work out. We could try to make life into a comfortable paradise for her, but even then she will have to appreciate it.
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A lot has been happening this week
I’ve connected with someone new and had the best sexual experiences of my life with them. I had this quote that @hunterad posted in the back of my mind going into it,
and with that attitude and approach in place I was able to enter into purity of sexuality that I had very rarely ever approached before.
I’m still reeling from those experiences… it was a breakthrough into feeling-states that I hadn’t accessed in some time.
She has left town - she lives in a remote part of Alaska and it will be awhile before I see her again, if ever - but I am determined to continue in this thread. There is palpable purity - and fear - and love. All mean that I feel very alive.
I had another friend over to my place last night and we discussed all things life & emotions for hours.
An observation she brought up was that she had recently purchased a house, and that ever since moving out of an apartment into that house, she had much less of a feeling of neediness for a man in her life.
I connected the dots to earlier in the night she had told me that her mother had once told her that she would one day need a stable man in her life in order to be safe - implying that she would never be able to take care of herself.
Now as an adult, divorced, operating a successful business on her own and now purchasing a nice house of her own volition, her mother’s point was solidly refuted. She was now experiencing a peace she hadn’t felt in decades.
It made me connect something I had vague notions of but hadn’t been able to penetrate, in my own issues of security, desire, and parental pressure.
After a night of some of the most intense and lucid dreams I’ve ever experienced, I awoke ready to take my time waking up on the day off from work and continue investigating this issue.
Several times in my life I’ve set off away from home in a bid to ‘make my way in the world,’ and each time after around a year I would return home, discouraged (though glad to be home), in debt, and needing help from my parents to get back on my feet.
This pattern created a few narratives for myself and my parents.
Similarly to my friend, there began to be a belief that I could not take care of myself on my own but needed help - and rather than from a man, it was coming from my parents. I’ve set myself up with a tiny house, which I still don’t regret, but it came out of that attitude of dependency.
That sense of dependency was accentuating a sense of being a ‘loser’, a feeling which has dogged me throughout most of my life.
I connect it largely to my relationship with my father, a dominating personality who is not afraid to use intimidation to get his way with people.
In any case, that attitude has followed me around throughout my life, and I have at different times taken various steps to get beyond that sense of being a loser. I’m glad I have done that, because it has caused me to go on many adventures, expand my horizons tremendously, and become experienced in things which would later serve me greatly in these investigations to become free.
However, that overall sense of being a loser would rarely leave for long.
Another way of describing that feeling, which I have written about here on occasion, is feeling ‘pathetic.’
Once I was able to identify that feeling, and connect it with that larger ‘loser’ narrative, I was able to use @Josef’s approach of 100% committing to the emotion.
It hung on more tenaciously than most other emotional states do, but after a couple of minutes peace overtook me - a purity, directness, and stability of peace I haven’t known in a long time.
It immediately became apparent that my efforts to fight being a loser by ‘winning’ in some way - frequently in my mind related to ‘getting the (right) girl’ - were doomed to failure because they existed in direct relation to the ‘loser’ narrative, which had to continue as an anxiety to maintain the existence of any ‘winner’ narrative.
The answer, rather, is in simply not feeling like a loser.
By coincidence I had something on the AFT open - which page it was specifically doesn’t matter - it was enough to remind me of the purity and simplicity of the actual world. None of these narratives or feeling states are actual. As long as I exist within the narrative I can continue re-combinating & wandering in circles forever and never get out. But escape is as simple as deciding that it doesn’t matter. I don’t have everything I want in life, but I don’t have to feel like a loser. I don’t have to feel pathetically. I can sit in bed on this luminous Monday morning, and gaze out the window at the trees swaying in the remainders of the overnight storm.
And then after a few more minutes, I put some pants on and made coffee.
Glorious.
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Strangely enough, I had a similar realisation yesterday eve - there is one “world” where things go on and on forever and the only solution is to leave it forever and completely…not like keep a small portion of it and continue, but a total abandon…
…and then there is the world “behind” it…where a magical like show and celebration is going on with a quality of strangeness to it…almost feels “unreal” from the normal experiencing of life - like how could it be that a simple, confusion and ghastliness free perfect world exist?
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