Kuba: Hi Vineeto,
A question if I could please, because this is the exact place where I have hit a wall in the past without any clear way how to proceed:
Basically looking at those ebbs and flows yesterday and today… it is a weird situation because I cannot find any particular beliefs, values, fantasies etc which are attached to the feelings, in fact I don’t think there are any. They seem to be purely habitual at this point.
Perhaps there were some beliefs around these feelings in the past but it seems that they have kind of become automated at this point, in that even in the absence of the belief the habitual feeling persists. So looking at the gloomy feelings yesterday evening there was a few which were connected to each other but they were not related to any beliefs or values. It was varying feelings of despair, panic and insecurity. They would be triggered periodically like a case of chronic back pain and would bounce from one to the other. But they have no rhyme of reason to them, there is the habitual feeling triggered by association and that is it.
Hi Kuba,
I think you answered this in your next post – those feeling may well have to do with your new discovery that your “number 1 priority” is to have “a favourable place”, being “a someone in relation to others”. Therefore your “varying feelings of despair, panic and insecurity” are most likely be related to this newly revealed priority.
Kuba: So how does one go about tackling these kinds of habituated feeling patterns? They are quite sticky in that when they come they have this ability to compel and yet at the same time I can see they are over nothing substantial. It’s like ‘I’ am not done with ‘being’ that feeling yet although ‘I’ have no ‘good reason’ for it other than habit. I could trace them to an event or thought, but other than that there was nothing more in terms of any social identity aspects which were behind it, just habitual feelings. It’s like someone flinching at the sight of a stick if they have been hit with one enough times.
What it seems like to me, is that the best way to approach these is to continue to experience them fully without moving in either direction, and when I do this usually within some short time the feeling is indeed exposed as just a habituated affective pattern. Then some time down the line it repeats again, just by sheer force of habit, but it does seem like that habit is being chipped away at each time I experience the feeling fully, see it for what it is and get back to feeling good. (link)
Before you proceed to “tackling these kinds of habituated feeling patterns” you may have to first find out which direction you want to proceed given that in your next post you said that “those 2 goals are mutually exclusive”.
Kuba: Aha well I can tell you what it is now Vineeto, with a high degree of confidence.
It is that enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is not my number 1 priority, but there is more… The reason it is not my number 1 priority is because I would rather pay into the piggy bank of being a group member, a someone in relation to others.
The “in relation to others” being especially important as ‘I’ wish to claim a favourable place.
And those 2 goals are mutually exclusive, enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive and ‘earning my place’ within the group.
I appreciate your sincerity.
This is a significant discovery. You presently give priority to your “wish to claim a favourable place” to be “a someone in relation to others” as “especially important”. This is indeed contra to wanting to diminish ‘me’ via becoming increasingly happy and harmless. It looks like you will have to find out if this priority is of lasting importance by proceeding in the direction of your desire (“wish”) for “a favourable place” (perhaps the top?) in a particular group.
Kuba: As such I have never put everything on a “it doesn’t ultimately matter” basis, one of the key things Richard did when first stepping onto the wide and wondrous path.
So yes this does already explain the different results for ‘Kuba’ and ‘Richard’. (link)
Indeed it goes some way to explain the different results. Your discovery also explains your recent objections to leaving humanity, to exploring naiveté and exquisite intimacy, and to moving from conditionally feeling good to feeling good unconditionally. It could also explain those “*habituated feeling patterns” or “any particular beliefs, values, fantasies” concerning this desire (“wish”*) which you mentioned in the previous message. Your “high achiever”, as you called him, apparently wants to achieve something more in a previously unexplored arena.
Richard: Put succinctly: the actualism method will not work as advertised when treated as being a materialism method. (Richard, AF List, Rick-a, 6 Mar 2006).
Cheers Vineeto