Journal de Henry

Journals
582

12|7|22

Well, I got laid the other day and to the surprise of absolutely no one, it did not result in a blissful existence.

In fact, I spent a good portion of that night in anxiety, with a new set of previously dormant fears coming to the fore. It was quite interesting dusting off these old saws after some time has passed.

Most of these anxieties had to do with a combination of my own beliefs about relationship & commitment, & projecting what her expectations about relationship & commitment might entail.

There was also the old issues with what to do if someone else attractive comes along

Looking at it the day after, I was able to mow many of these fears down, largely via considering that I’ll do whatever I best can when such a circumstance arrives. Additionally, my fear of being left alone was reduced considerably because I can now more clearly see that the binary having sex = good, being alone = bad doesn’t hold much water. After all, I had just had sex and was immediately swarmed by anxieties.

What I’m left with now is a view that any concept of ‘relationship’ doesn’t mean much, as it’s all based on predictions of future states which are held in an imaginary stasis.

At any future time someone else interesting could come along, or I could well continue with this same person for who knows how long. It is impossible to predict.

This is a thrilling situation to consider, and leaves me on the bleeding edge of now-ness.

I also find that many of my previous ‘single’ concerns are still present, as I’m already thinking in terms of ‘trading up.’ So in many ways, nothing has changed.

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12|8|22

Tired!

Right now my fear seems to be if C is sensual-sexual enough

Basically her ability to turn me on

So basically I believe it’s her job for me to be ‘turned on enough’

In other words how I feel is up to her

And then my job is to attract the ‘right person’ that can ‘turn me on enough’

This is going to require more investigation

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12|9|22

Made a breakthrough on the intimacy front by deciding to prioritize being 100% there with C regardless of the situation, and experienced a change in the ambience that made it immediately clear where the issues were coming from

I had been placing certain expectations on what the sexual experience should look like, as well as feeling beholden to certain performance parameters

With the emphasis on being 100% there for ‘whatever,’ it was apparent that all those ideas were coming 100% from me and nowhere else. Without those expectations in place, I found the experience intensely sensual regardless of what she did, or even whether we were physically touching or not.

Quite interesting, as well as encouraging.

I’ve also burst into awareness of a significant block which has been in place for a long time regarding my overall enjoyment of being here. I can see that I’ve frequently felt that I could be happy if only I was around people, or around a pretty girl, or if only those people treated me a certain way. This most recent experience reveals that it has to do with me and no one else.

I know I have more to find in this and I see it as the next most significant area for me to pay attention to.

It’s funny how with the relaxation / realization around one issue, the next thing is revealed.

In the past I’ve used various coping mechanisms to ‘come to terms’ with these feelings of disappointment over the years, but the coping mechanisms simply add more complications & ‘cover’ to something that is still occurring under the surface.

I believe that somewhere else are people having more fun than me, and that I am not invited. I’ve expended a lot of time & energy guessing why I’m not invited, what to do to be invited, and feeling disappointment about my beliefs around the situation.

Perhaps it is inaccessible not because I’m ‘not invited,’ but for some other reason that I don’t understand

Either way, it feels like something that is ‘over there’ while I am stuck ‘over here,’ spinning aimlessly

Years of depression contributed to the belief… I am over here being depressed, and ‘over there’ are the happy people having a good time

For a long time I just felt trapped in that depression, and at some point around 2012 I became determined to fight back, to put effort in & ‘figure my life out.’

A lot changed at that time, and in fact some of the most fun I had in my life was around 2013-2014 when a lot of new things were accessible to me, many negative beliefs I had had about myself and my life were toppled.

However, there were also some large disappointments that occurred in that period (stretching 2014-Spring 2022) which added complexity and entrenched some negative ideas.

Among these was a drive to be ‘cautious,’ ‘careful,’ after being semi-traumatized by various experiences of heartbreak and economic insecurity.

As a result I adopted a certain distance toward women, and arranged a very rigid-feeling living situation

This distance has changed shape sometimes but has, in broad strokes, consisted of a doubt that this or that girl is ‘enough,’ and a kind of holding them at a distance, ready to bolt at any time

The living situation has had to do with coming up with a plan to spend less money as a way to avoid economic insecurity (while also subtly wanting to avoid working). I can see that there’s rigidity in it because every time I consider changing anything, I’m struck by a jolt of fear. I can allow myself to experience that emotional moment more and see what comes out of that feeling.

I can now see that both of these are two different ways of holding life at a distance. I can remember other times in my life that I didn’t have that sense. Insecurity has made me cautious - timid.

The best thing I can do is allow that feeling to do its thing and see what happens.

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Waves alternating - misery, purity

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12|22|22

As a follow up to this post, I went on a first date last night with a new girl and had a really excellent time.

I was purposely looking out for the ‘making a fool of myself out of nervousness’ issue from before, and before the date I could see nervousness setting in and made an effort to figure it out minutes before she showed up.

Luckily I remembered something that had worked for me a few weeks ago when I was meeting with my ex, which was turning the nervousness into excitement for it to go well. It took just a few seconds to see it this way, and then she was there.

The date itself was delightful, she is very intelligent and it didn’t take long to get into interesting topics such as the inability of systems of law to create peace in the world. I found her sensible, and she was understanding what I had to say straightforwardly, which is not a common experience for me with these topics.

Most importantly, we both had a vibe of delight & mutual interest for the entire date - there were only a couple of moments of nervousness or hesitation on either of our parts, and last night and today I took the chance to look at them a bit closer - cleaning up loose ends.

I find myself in the familiar position of being tempted to fall in love. However, I have also experienced enough of actualist morality to watch out for ‘keeping her at a distance’ as a way to avoid love. The way forward is delight - at having met such a delightful person, at having done well at my intentions for the date, and for being in this position in general.

There is a subtle line between delight and love and gratitude, and for most people they’re all muddled together. Having an interesting time sussing between them, with an especial eye to let the delight run unbridled.

Having the time of my life.

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Remembering what Richard says about the delight of actualism being unconditional rather than dependent on conditions, I can see that a lot of my delight right now is dependent on her being interested in me romantically

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12|29|22

I’ve been living some kind of Mambo #5 life this month, going on great dates with 3 different girls.

It’s a little strange considering the amount of time I’ve spent in my life yearning without success, and then suddenly… something is working. Not sure exactly what it is, I’ve tweaked my tinder bio a bit, and I’m definitely happier and more relaxed than at most other times.

There has been a lot of intimacy, fantastic conversations and closeness, with the only thing spoiling it being me feeling critically toward them at different moments.

These critical feelings have also frequently been accompanied with guilt, which has served to keep those feelings at a distance and therefore hard to examine, and also plunge me into negative feelings frequently after dates.

I find myself confused because at different stages of whatever date things went fantastically with tons of close intimacy, but still at different junctures there are critical feelings. This confuses ‘me’ because ‘I’ want to simply be in love with them and imagine that I can feel lovingly forever and a day.

In practice this is not possible, and I can remember feeling this confusion and frustration with every girl I’ve ever been with.

There is guilt because of inability to live up to the fantasy of constant & unconditional loving, with the awareness that if they knew about my rejecting-critical feelings & thoughts that it would likely cause them to feel badly.

This is worth investigating more closely because here I’m putting myself in the position of being masters of their emotions.

@Andrew pointed out to me:

It’s a trap/trick that as a man I am responsible for how she feels. More insidiously though, I concern myself with how she feels to protect my interest in having her company to assuage loneliness/ ensure access to sex/ validation.

Something I’ve been aware of this month has been that I was actually happier in November than now that I’ve ostensibly gotten what I want / am having success, because these feelings are very active now.

So it’s a bit funny to be doing all this work to concern myself with someone’s feelings (as in, trying to manipulate them to like me) when it’s objectively causing me greater suffering

That’s the paradox of people-pleasing, we do it to ‘not be lonely’ but the action of people-pleasing is inherently painful and thus leaves us dissatisfied & ultimately lonely

It’s time for me to go to sleep but I know I have much more to find in this.

I’m glad about what’s happening, it’s bringing all this right to the front. I’ve done pretty well in not getting dragged down for long. I want to make the most of this life, of the time with these wonderful people I’m meeting.

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589

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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590

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?

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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” :smiley: 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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592

Wow thanks @claudiu this is big! My brain right now is going :bulb: :bulb:

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? :unamused:

593

So you mean for years I have fought myself? By splitting away from certain parts and aggrandising others?

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594

This is really so simple I can’t believe I never saw it so clearly! :exploding_head:

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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595

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.

596

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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597

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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598

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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599

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…

600

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

601

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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