That was a fantastic read @Kub933!
Very informative and well written.
So this morning my mum has messaged me with the below which I thought was interesting :
"Hi Kuba. I want to tell you about something related to behaviour change and to the diagram you made. Next time I will explain it properly to you what I just found and realised this morning. Just to say that in short I found out that it is a silly thing we are told that we can not change our character. Even X said its like that but I showed her that this is a silly thing we are told to believe in that.
I am changing the way I react to things. This is not my character, the bad behaviour I had and I still have. I can influence the nerves connections that make me to react a certain way.
I train my brain by analysing how I reacted, by being back to to the situation if possible. So when we discussed something about playing cards and I got nervous or “aggressive”, I ask sometime … Can we be back to the moment when I reacted not as I would like to? "
It is fascinating to me and I am so glad that she is making these discoveries for herself, they are her own discoveries and they just happen to align with the discoveries that other Actualists have made!
This shows that what is being spoken about is based in fact, because she has unilaterally reached the same conclusions, I have only given her a brief description of the method based on the diagram and we spoke at length about my own life experiences but she is not aware of Actualism as a ‘thing’.
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The past few days things have been somewhat intense. It could be best described by Peter’s writing below
A variety of weird experiences are possible for one’s traditional defences, ways of coping or ways of avoiding, are no longer available. It is often as though one is naked in the world and it takes nerves of steel to not raise one’s traditional defences but to stay with any feelings of vulnerability and fear. Each time one dares to fully lower one’s guard and experience the consequences as only temporary and unsustainable instinctual emotional reactions, one gains more confidence to keep going, no matter what.
Those instinctual emotional reactions can be so powerful and overwhelming at times and it seems the only thing that will diminish them is time and maybe doing something physical like going training etc. But it seems like fundamentally they just need to ‘do their thing’ and fizzle out.
It is very weird because it’s so disproportional, as in on the outside I can see things are just fine and yet on the inside there is like this cornered animal.
The other tricky thing is that they seem to be very raw instinctual reactions, it is ‘me’ at the core so they do not seem to relate to any discernible triggers or beliefs, it’s just ‘me’ ‘being’ ‘me’. It is like I have shaved away most of the outer layers and now what is inside is this raw affective energy.
So I have been trying to suss out how to proceed in this case. It is pretty clear that as long as those passions are raging on the inside I cannot feel happy and harmless. Yet they are fundamental to ‘being’ ‘me’, I cannot remove those in the same way as I might remove a layer of social conditioning.
So far the main approach I have been taking is what Peter describes :
Each time one dares to fully lower one’s guard and experience the consequences as only temporary and unsustainable instinctual emotional reactions, one gains more confidence to keep going, no matter what
Sometimes I wonder though just how many times do I go on this ride? Because it seems like that raw affective current is a bottomless pit.
So this morning a different answer surfaced, I actually found then forgot about this, so today seemed like re-discovering it. I realised that the way to proceed is to agree to get out of the way. Once ‘I’ am whittled down to this core version of ‘me’ it is not possible to reduce further, and ‘I’ cannot fight this energy either as it is ‘me’.
‘I’ can however step aside and allow life to happen of its own accord. And this morning I experienced it exactly like this, there was this instinctual compulsion to passionately clamp down on life, to seek to control tooth and nail. To insert ‘myself’ into every situation and event thus making them unnecessarily complicated and difficult, and necessitating ‘solutions’. All in all a rather great plot to remain in existence haha.
Then there was this other choice to get out of the way, it is interesting because this getting out of the way has been very effective but it has also brought up a few of its own objections.
Ultimately they boil down to the fact that ‘I’ can’t accept that ‘I’ am actually making things more difficult for no reason at all (or actually there is a reason… It is that this way ‘I’ get to remain ‘me’).
When ‘I’ get out of the way there are no problems to begin with and ‘I’ just can’t accept that!
What I am seeing clearer is that ‘being human’ is this enormous drama that is actually over absolutely nothing. We have fabricated this enormous construct of problems and solutions, painted the various stories with emotions and beliefs and now we are living out of this illusion calling it ‘being human’.
Just before my class yesterday I was in the car having a cigarette and I saw the above so completely, like I have never seen before. This whole construct of ‘humanity’, that it is nothing but a story, I felt kind of silly that I have believed it so passionately my whole life, that all this suffering and conflict happened as a result of living out a story.
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Wow Kuba, thanks for sharing. I am stuck and reading this post of yours, has
arrived just in time!
@FrankN If you are looking to apply the approach in my post then I should probably write more as something else has clarified itself yesterday.
What I realised yesterday is that actually all the approaches mentioned in my post work in concert. What I mean by that is that in order to sincerely choose the option of ‘getting out of the way’ some ‘conditions’ need to be in place.
This is because I cannot give something up if I do not know what it is that I am abandoning. Those deep parts of myself need to be explored and investigated fully, in order to do this though I need to allow myself to feel them fully. If I am fighting them, trying to distract myself from them or splitting myself away from them then I will never arrive at the genuine choice to ‘get out of the way’.
I do like a good summary so here is my attempt to depict how this process could work out in practice :
1 - Layers of social conditioning peeled back
2 - ‘Me’ at the core exposed, felt fully then thoroughly explored and investigated.
3 - At times due to step 1+2 various instinctual emotional reactions will be triggered, one needs to ride these out and get back to feeling good.
4 - Once the whole emotional landscape is fully explored and understood then ‘I’ can see that the best thing for ‘me’ to do is to simply get out of the way.
The reason I wrote it out like this is because I wanted to highlight that as Srinath mentioned a while back, sometimes it can take considerable emotional work in order to see something as silly.
If I just try to jump to the ‘getting out of the way’ step without first feeling and exploring those feelings fully, then I am most likely kidding myself.
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I have been doing a little bit of gaming recently, there is something about getting fully engaged in gaming that has a flavour of naiveté for me. It might be because when I was much younger I spent so many years gaming. I have many many memories of the incredible amount of fun I had gaming as a child, it was the sort of fun that I cannot seem to be able to recreate as an adult,
nothing quite ‘hits’ the same.
But is it the world that has somehow morphed into a dead/passive place or was it ‘me’?
It’s hard to describe but there is this ambience of being fully lost in/engulfed by the experience, there is a sense of experiencing it for the very first time, there is a magic to it, I have so many memories just like this.
The reason I have not done any gaming since late teenager/adult is because I had to invest into ‘myself’, I had to go ‘out there’ and become a ‘someone’, and gaming is a waste of time is it not 
? I simply wouldn’t allow myself to fully enjoy the doing of something for no other reason than the enjoyment of it. Because that would be ‘a waste of time’. Everything became a means to an end, a means to amass and to become ‘more’.
This is what took away that simple enjoyment of being alive that I remember as a child, I have countless memories of that place which have become unlocked over time, that same flavour is in all of them, and it is such an incredible flavour.
It is a funny ‘problem’ really, and I know I am not the only one who experiences it because you always hear about life becoming a chore when you grow up, all those responsibilities and obligations, all those things that apparently I have to look out for!
And I am still invested in that worldview… As I was gaming yesterday and having a great time, there was a feeling that I need to get to the gym and train martial arts, that I will be a no-one soon if I don’t start putting in the work again, once more it is that obligation and responsibility.
I started questioning just whom am I obligated towards? Is it my students, my main instructor, my training partners? Am I not choosing to train/coach martial arts of my own accord, do I really owe any of them anything?
All the pressure of responsibility/obligation comes from the inside, from ‘me’. It is not actually coming from ‘out there’ as I believed, ‘I’ am the culprit. There is an incredible freedom to be found here, and I know it! It is like I am standing on the precipice of it 
It is like there is a film of ‘seriousness’ that overlays the world, keeping me locked out of that place that I know so well. The great thing is that this ‘seriousness’ has less and less to justify itself, in fact very little now it seems, it seems more habitual than anything at this point.
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Thanks Kuba for “hitting me” very “softly” with this very important and
essential clarification/reminder. Every bit of the writing by All of you has been helpful
and being hacked into this identity’s brain 
Update: I have been using/keeping current time awareness ( henry, This Moment ) and being very alert ( Elgin), and interested and noticing my inner world ( and outer world 
) and the mere accomplishment of just being able to barely start playing with this, has been fun and surprising, for me !
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Absolutely. I had so many of these ideas of what is cool, good and not good. It’s just mind-boggling how we deny ourselves the funniest things just to be good people, grown ups or even good actualists. “I need to focus on feeling excellent”, while I could instead just enjoy watching a movie, playing a game etc. Just ordinary fun, ordinary feeling good. Ordinary feeling good is good enough. The rest comes of it’s own accord.
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I wanted to write something as its pretty quiet at work at the moment but there is not so much to write actually haha.
My baseline seems to be at a very stable plateau lately, of course there are always these small or sometimes slightly larger ‘blips’, but all in all it seems I am mostly sweeping up the last bits of dust after all the main bits of rubble have been removed from the psyche, this is how I am experiencing it at the moment.
This is making investigation a lot more fun now, because the things being looked at are not as scary anymore, it is like I am just tidying up the last bits and it is quite fun to focus on smaller and smaller things that are detracting from feeling happy and harmless. I can really get super pedantic with investigation and it can be quite fascinating.
Sometimes there are these instinctual emotional reactions that have a bit more of an overwhelming effect and do not seem to relate to any sort of belief but rather are felt to be ‘me’ at the core.
They are kind of like when watching a piece of wood that is almost wholly consumed by a flame, the embers are getting more and more gentle, but every now and then due to the temperature a little explosion followed by a larger fire erupts for a very short time, that is ‘me’ at the moment it seems.
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This morning driving to work I had a very interesting realisation, it is one of those things that writing it out seems like parroting the AFT so I will try to find some other words to describe it
I was recently looking at the power dynamics which happen at work and the hurt, resentment and conflict that results from them. What I saw a while ago is that any power play can only happen if both individuals believe in the ‘roles’ that are being played and the parameters under which the ‘game’ operates. None of the ‘power play’ is happening in actuality.
I can see these power plays exemplifying any relationship within the real world. For example employee vs boss, man vs woman, son vs father etc. I can also observe the terrible consequences of these power plays within me, both when I am the ‘looser’ and also when I am the ‘winner’. So I have been sincerely looking for a way to step out of this, which means looking at the roles and the beliefs which support them, as well as clearly seeing the consequences of all this.
The interesting thing is that I personally play many ‘roles’ which hold different levels of ‘power’ associated with them. My relationship to customers or my boss at work is that of a ‘master’/‘servant’ where I am the ‘servant’. However my role with regards to coaching martial arts is that of a ‘master’ (I should probably mention again that all of this is only happening in the psyche).
Being able to experience the extremes of power has been very useful for me to observe and understand that power itself is corrupt, wether I am the ‘master’ or ‘servant’. This is because even when I am the one in power, my fellow human being is handing over their autonomy and subjugating themselves to essentially my whims, this is so very dangerous for their own wellbeing.
I know this because I can experience the ‘looser’ side of the power battle in myself, so the whole thing has to go. There cannot be peace and harmony as long as there is power at play, which means the roles must be eliminated. Unless the other is seen as a fellow human being I cannot have peace and harmony.
Writing this post something is becoming very clear, because I have struggled to give up playing the roles which grant me power for so long and it seems the answer has come somewhat serendipitously
And it has come from directly experiencing the consequences that power has on my wellbeing as well as that of others.
It all started on Monday when I was doing some sparring with my brother and he caught me in some good moves, I felt crap about my progress and I ended up entering a rather aggressive mode of training (I didn’t hurt anyone but I was driven by aggression at this point which I do not like) In that moment I was on a mission, to demonstrate that ‘I still have it’. So the next few sparring rounds I went with other students who are not as good as my brother. I had the mindset of winning and not learning, of essentially demonstrating that ‘I am still in power’.
Although I did not hurt anyone, the intensity which I was rolling against them with was not warranted at all!
Driving home after this I felt deeply regretful and ashamed about what I was doing. It became clear to me as well that from the viewpoint of the student, they must simply accept this ass whooping in silence and shake my hand with gratitude at the end! 
, this is where the very ugly side of power, of being the ‘master’ became apparent. They were simply a pawn which was there to accept whatever I chose to do at a whim, and this is a terrible, terrible set up to have if I care about my fellow human being. This gave me the initial intent to actually solve this once and for all, because I could see what power does to others.
The next day you could say karma got me 
as my boss at work seemed in a particularly bad mood and without me going into detail, ended up using his power in a similar fashion to what I did the day before to my students. Except this time I was the ‘looser’, I was right at the bottom of that power structure. Experiencing myself a victim, helpless, simply an object to be abused by the one in power etc. Experiencing all this so deeply and from both sides has demonstrated just how rotten power is.
Yet as above, power only exists because of the belief in the individual ‘roles’ and the ‘game’ as a whole.
This morning I woke up with intent to get to the bottom of all this. Driving to work I began experiencing the various stories which we overlay on top of the world of people, things and events. I saw those stories as these distorted stencils placed onto the actual object, the word “aberration” came into mind. They are always out of whack because they are secondary to that which is actual, they can only be imitations and poor ones at that! In fact they are more like projections, coloured by the various emotions.
And so in seeing this I could also see that the answer is to live that which is actual, there is absolutely no need to continue perpetuating those stories because they can never match the purity of the actual. It was quite fun because I could see how depending on ‘who’ I am interacting with and what the situations are, a different ‘stencil’ is projected onto the world of people, things and events. It then informs me of the rules under which I must operate, one of those being to conform to the pre-existing power structure, or to go to war against it in hope of becoming an authority myself. Neither of which options ever lead to equity, intimacy and peace, they only lead to more of what we already see all around.
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In which way will the roles be weakened to then be eliminated ?
Experientially at affective level !
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Great post @Kub933 as always!
I don’t know if you see it that way, but I have still an image instilled in me which somehow demands a master/sensei etc. to be superior even if he is an old brittle grandpa
It’s completely insane and may just stem form the old martial arts movies I consumed at young age.
The grandpa sensei may not be physically on par with the younger ones, but he still knows how to outwit them with his knowledge, his insights and all his secret techniques! Great stuff to think about.
Hey @FrankN, I don’t think the process here is any different than looking at any other belief, it would go somewhat as below :
1 - I notice that my happiness and harmlessness keeps being usurped by the same theme and so I decide to do something about it.
2 - I identify the general theme then become aware of all the emotional structures which make it up, as well as the underlying passions which fuel the whole thing.
3 - I set off on a full exploration into this reality, investigating all the beliefs and feelings that make it up. Of course this exploration is not just intellectual, all the emotional concepts are fully felt then investigated with attentiveness. This looking is what allows for belief to be replaced with fact.
4 - The other dimension to this exploration which clicked for me yesterday is that if there is sincere intent to be happy and harmless, I am soon faced with the experiential knowledge of what this whole thing is doing to me and my fellow human being. Then if there is sincere intent to be happy and harmless I have no other option but to effect change within myself.
5 - If the above is done sincerely and obsessively it will lead to change. I have not resolved this particular thing yet so I cannot speak from experience here, however I have used more or less this process to resolve a bunch of other things that are now like a distant memory 
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Yes I hold Bruce Lee responsible for all this madness 
But yes it is exactly the kind of fantasy you describe, I wrote about it previously in my journal because @henryyyyyyyyyy made a similar observation to you.
The interesting thing is that this whole ‘sensei’ fantasy is no different to the master/disciple structure in religion which Richard writes so much about.
It is the pursuit for the ultimate power, to be forever set apart from others as special. It is crazy that this thing still persists in me but it does! I am intent in getting to the bottom of it though so we will see what comes soon, watch this space
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Wait a minute! Let’s keep Bruce Lee out of this equation. He and Muhammad Ali were my idols when I was a kid. Plus, he didn’t establish the “old cranky grandpa defeating the young folks” trope.
He was really special. I can watch the Chuck Norris fight scene over and over without ever getting bothered by it
I think the master in Big Stan definitely emulates the old cranky grandpa stereotype!
Once again Kuba, you surprise with very detailed,helpful, and clearly ( well organized ) written response.
Your response, has encouraged me to do my first “formal” investigation, into my feelings of uneasiness during ( sleep and awake) napping [ 1 hour long ] this afternoon.
When I would wake up, every 5-10 minutes, I would feel anxious and uneasy about the napping itself, as if I was doing something that I was not suppose to be doing.
There was a sense of maybe guilt or shame ( I am not too sure), about why I was napping!
I could recall these feelings with regards to being inactive during the day as a reoccurring theme.
Maybe I feel like I am wasting time, and also I am escaping the fact that I don’t have that much to
do? Being bored or ashamed of something?
When I decide to take a nap, there was no feelings or conflict about it; but when I would wake up several times during the nap, these feelings crept up. The feeling of helplessness and anxiety! Maybe shame about laziness?
Kuba’s and Elgin’s above posts reminded me of Ip Man ( the movie character) as to how noble and
great he was. Maybe I want to be more like him? More alive, more something else… And I realized that if I hold on to these negative feelings, I don’t have to give up the positive fantasies of being like Ip Man either?
This investigation is fairly fresh, and I have not had enough time to dig deep into it, hence a lot of
? marks 
But if my intent is to be happy and harmless, then I need to do what I can and must to bring about change in how I feel and what I believe ( that are behind those feelings).
Update: I have been able to feel good more and more during the day, and am able to return to
feeling good, even after unpleasant emotions( much faster than ever before ). I don’t think I would
have much progress if it was not for this site and you all’s valuable inputs.
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So I have been looking at what I mentioned in this post here - Journal de Henry - #335 by Kub933 with regards to that sense of waking on eggshells when interacting with people.
That aspect is still very much evident, it’s more or less there in most interactions. The interesting thing is that when I am feeling good it fades, when I am feeling excellent that aspect seems gone completely, there is only fun. I noticed this especially when doing my weekend hen party gigs. Usually before the job there is a certain current of anxiety that is very concerned with how they will react to me. Last weekend though I managed to dip into that place where there is only fun, and I found myself in the middle of this hen party, completely at ease, feeling excellent and with not a single part of me anxious about what may happen. It is very much the definition of all my energy being fed into the felicitous and innocuous feelings.
It’s really cool to experience this because it shows that this walking on eggshells it’s all to do with me, it is not ‘out there’ and it is not necessary at all.
Still though when I am back to more or less normal there is generally a holding back to some degree, and it seems to be to do with the volatility of peoples emotional reactions.
It is because when interacting with others it is almost impossible to ensure that some word I say or action I do does not bump into an emotion or belief and thus set off this entire reactionary response. Which usually leads to various forms of projecting, manipulating etc this is particularly evident in my work in customer service. Sometimes a customer is upset because they have misunderstood something, now for me to point out the facts of the situation is taken as an insult on them personally and of course this sets off a whole train of reactions that then have to be manoeuvred around successfully to keep some semblance of peace.
The main fear I have it seems is that I am afraid of what they will do, and not just the customers but people in general. There is this underlying fear that feels as though if I do not operate within this emotional framework successfully, I will have real consequences to deal with. Eg in the example of the customer they may go ahead and make a complaint towards me as a way proving to themselves that they were right after all.
On the other hand there is a resentment in me for having to navigate through this stuff at all, it goes something like “why do I always have to bite my lip when they are plainly wrong and refuse to acknowledge the facts”.
So the way out of this is not clear yet, I can see however that it is as always all to do with me. In most cases it is my fear of what could happen, and the general belief that something ‘bad’ will happen, that makes me enter this whole ‘game’ out of fear.
So it seems the thing to do is to actually see that it is safe to no longer play the game, to allow people to feel whatever it is that they are feeling, no longer looking to control how they react out of fear.
Of course this means being honest with myself as to wether I may be feeding into the situation with my own affective response. Yet it is pretty clear in seeing Richard writing on AFT or even @Srinath and @claudiu writing recently on the dharma overground, that even if I cut out my involvement completely, it does not prevent others from having reactionary emotional responses, those will end when humans are free of the instinctual passions.
There is also this interesting interplay between not triggering people too far and also not simply ‘going with the flow’. Because at the end of the day I probably don’t think and act like most people do, and there is good reason for this, if my friend wants to have a good long moan about the state of the world to me, am I just to nod and agree out of social politeness? Do I risk actually making it known what I think about the situation and potentially face their emotional responses? The cool thing is that this chain of events could actually benefit them (potentially)
I have tried that route of suppressing myself before and it does not make sense to me, after all why should I pretend to go along with the status quo when I have dedicated my life to finding something better, am I to forever remain silent out of fear? And what is the point of say hanging out with my friends if I am simply pretending to be like them? Do I not want to be close to my fellow human beings? And does that not entail not keeping a part of myself hidden?
Yet as above this has to be done in a way that is sensible and benign. All super interesting stuff to think about 
Lately there is a lot of confidence that I can live the answer to all these questions.
What I noticed as well when talking with @edzd and @henryyyyyyyyyy on zoom recently, is that when talking to individuals who are not as easily triggered the conversation can be so much more fascinating and beneficial to all concerned, it would be great to have this with everyone and not just actualists haha
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I’ve found there’s a lot of skillfulness to be found in this issue, basically the two extremes are to always speak your mind / say exactly what you mean, or to never speak your mind and always conceal what you really think.
If you go to either extreme all the time there will be problems, with always concealing it’s obviously a missed opportunity for interesting conversations and who knows it may help someone.
But if you go to the other extreme, it’s not necessarily beneficial and I would even argue can be traumatic to people for someone to come along and completely undermine whatever world-view they’re existing in. The example I like to use is that it wouldn’t be very useful for me to walk into a church and proclaim, “God isn’t real, he’s your own projected delusion which has been institutionalized, your entire life is a lie.”
If anything, trying to do this would most likely make them embed further in their beliefs.
I’m still figuring it out myself, but I can say that people will supply some subtle hints of if they’re ready for ‘x’ conversation, or sometimes I’ll ask if they ‘want to talk about it’ before revealing my hand… little by little.
Especially when it comes to what the PCE makes evident, it is too much for most people!
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