Hi Vineeto,
Thank you for your reply, actually I was going to take some time off from all things actualist but this just ended up with me getting stressed over a phone transfer that refused to go smoothly…
You wrote :
I also remember reading Claudiu’s report from visiting Geoffrey, and how he mentioned that Geoffrey’s wife found him to be a “safe haven” from the real world.
It’s a bit like that when I read your response, not even just the words specifically, but just the fact that there is this obvious actual caring, genuine good-will and a total lack of sorrow and malice. Somehow reading your words re-kindles the connection to that tenderness aspect. But also it reminds me that sorrow and malice are intrinsically connected, that even by ‘being’ stressed ‘I’ am inflicting hurt, and not just to myself - that is the main point really, that to ‘be’ sorrow and malice in any degree is to inflict hurt, to radiate (psychically) that very hurt which ‘I’ am. And then in your words this whole thing is completely absent, hence it is a “safe haven” and a reminder of the tenderness possible.
You know experientially it seems that ‘I’ as the ‘controller’ have ‘my’ claws dug in quite strong, ‘I’ can deceive ‘myself’ that everything is going smoothly but all it takes is for a phone transfer to go south and ‘I’ start grasping and arrogating and fighting etc.
We talked in the past about my “inner mother”, and this is not to apply any blame to my mother at all, but I am pretty certain this is a still unresolved aspect of it. I remember my mother from my youngest years to similarly have life tightly grasped in the claws of the ‘controller’, far beyond what ‘normal’ would be. It was like this mix of fierce attempts to control life with this constant underlying anxiety, expressed as an ongoing state of stress with angry outbursts. It seems that ‘I’ absorbed like a sponge the same kind of basic MO for life. And then the narcissism and the self-importance only cemented all this further.
Of course ‘I’ do not want to ‘be’ this any more, and not even just for ‘my’ sake but for everyone’s benefit. So this seems like a pretty big and obvious obstacle that is staring me right in the face, and I am not sure how it is to be addressed yet, I can see cracks in it but I cannot yet sincerely contemplate dissolving the whole thing.