Hi Kuba,
I am pleased you gained a useful insight/ understanding which could clear up part of the “many misunderstandings” you said you had, and rumination is a perfect word for your psychological ‘escapade’. Now there is an opportunity to apply the new understanding each time you notice is a diminishment in feeling happy and harmless. This new approach also might require an adjustment in your affective awareness when monitoring your mood.
Richard: Hence being (affectively) aware, each moment again, of more and more subtle variations in the quality of one’s moment-to-moment enjoyment and appreciation of being alive/ of being here so as to earlier and earlier pre-empt any potential reversion to type. (Richard, List D, Claudiu4, 3 Feb 2016).
I emphasise this because many people are considering their previous buddhistic ‘noting’ (including putting aside those noted emotions as ‘unsatisfactory’) equivalent to the actualist affective awareness and fascinated attentiveness. I had this confirmed by one actualist recently telling me of their habit to just being aware of a whole lot of a range of successive feelings occurring would give them the feeling they were ‘doing actualism’, whilst this ‘awareness’ actually did nothing to change their affective mood.
Which brings me back to the pure intent of which you said –
Kuba: “I think I have got the flavour now, of pure intent, it is exactly as those words describe – “a genuinely occurring stream of benevolence and benignity that originates in the perfect and vast stillness that is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe”. (link)
But promptly after discovering the flavour, which you pointed out was missing in your previous endeavours, you planned to “to take some time off from all things actualist”, which to me does not look like the action of someone who has a firm connection to pure intent. Was it, after all, only of the ‘been-there-done-that-bought-the-T-shirt’ variety?
In other words, when your affective awareness is imbued with the (now-discovered) flavour of pure intent, and becomes a present-time active ongoing connection to pure intent, then nothing can be swept under the carpet. Which means when you are looking for “what leads to change” the first item in the sequence of change is the affective awareness which may well require adjustment. When your aim is to imitate the actual, as experienced in the flavour of pure intent, then your attitude towards being aware of any diminishment in enjoyment and appreciation is equally imbued with a vital interest in getting back to, or increasing, the quality how you felt before the diminishment set in.
Kuba: And there is for sure successes that have come from this venture, for example what Sonya wrote in her journal the other day about the vibes at home, it is really like that now where fundamentally every day we like each other and we get on together. It is the main reason why I simply could not have ‘me’ ‘being’ the stress, as in I could not accept it because I can see what it has the potential to do. But also I think since the talks we had about blame it clicked for both of us, so now there is this (very nice) outcome where we both naturally give each other grace when the other falls off the wagon for a bit. So this elimination of blame for us both was a solid success indeed, and it was not the outcome of rumination or an all or nothing approach, it was something more sincere that did it.
It is a pleasure to read you are both having fun together – can you see how daring (to change) comes from caring? “Giving grace” is rather an ominous choice of words as it includes “showing compassion, extending leniency, offering forgiveness”, whereas when one doesn’t take offence then there is nothing to forgive or offer leniency. I am sure you will be working out those pitfalls in due course – the simple awareness to not blame oneself and/or the other for being a feeling being makes such perfect sense that to “give grace” would not be required once the habit of blaming is eradicated.
Kuba: So I guess the main thing I need to experientially clarify for myself, is what leads to change. You wrote :
Vineeto: “When looking for a causation of an emotional occurrence the trigger and attitudinal cause is much closer than you may have thought/ felt (actualism is *new*, not old as in psychology)”
This is also a good clue, because I do have this tendency to treat it as if it is some psychological case, that is where the rumination and the all or nothing approach comes in. That ‘I’ will observe these feelings and structures and ‘I’ will draw a map of the various past causes etc. But then by the end of it, there is no change! It seems where change typically has happened is where I get sick of going round in circles and just stop. So it is like I get there in the end but with much time wasted.
Ha, I guess you are not aware what Richard wrote of the aims of psychology –
Richard: Mr. Sigmund Freud’s (…) solution: A well-balanced personality is one that can juggle these conflicting demands in a compromise between social responsibility and personal gratification. His result: A troubled personality could, with analysis, be returned to normal. His definition of normal: ‘Common human unhappiness’. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List B, No. 20b, 25 July 1998)
Respondent: It is a privilege to work in a field that interests oneself.
Richard: Be that as it may … as psychology/ psychiatry has not brought, is not bringing, and will not bring, peace-on-earth, then nothing that a psychological/ psychiatric approach has to offer has, is, or will, be of use/ be of service to a person setting foot on the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom from the human condition. (Richard, AF List, No. 68b, 1 Dec 2004).
A fellow forum-member reported his own experiential finding after having sought some psychological professional help –
Chrono: “everything in the real world is about ‘keeping my head above water’”. (link)
So, psychology is certainly not a feature of the Third Alternative and has no solutions for the disease called the human condition. Heck, they are as convinced as everyone else that ‘you can’t change human nature’.
Kuba: And from what I can see, what leads to change is essentially what you wrote here :
Vineeto: “Can you see that the deciding factor between analysing your past and seeing the fact now is that you have the choice, right now, to actually change – not because you are forced to for moralistic reasons but because you are intelligent and have a benign and benevolent aim in life?”
So essentially this rumination is clutter, and it can be discarded, which means then I do not require some long though-out process to grant me the permission to get back to feeling good or to leave behind some dearly held aspect of ‘me’. (link)
Yes, what you need is the sincere intent, an obsession if you like, to do whatever is necessary to get back to being as felicitous and innocuous as possible – both for your own benefit and that of your fellow human beings.
Cheers Vineeto