This is well said @Kub933. I would see this in myself as my need to feel superior.
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Since this morning the words that have been on my mind are : sincere, genuine and naive. To be those is to no longer engage in that whole game I described in the previous post.
Being naive means no longer buying into the collective wisdom of humanity. Being genuine means that I am no longer acting out a persona that ultimately comprises of various fantasies. Being genuine means that I can act with sincerity, which means being free of deceit. To be sincere means that A = A always, not A being used to mean/achieve X.
I have been looking at this, what is the need for fantasy and deceit? Why is it that I am driven to pursue those ideals, there is good feelings in those but those are only there to cover up the bad feelings of not being good enough. What keeps the whole thing spinning?
It seems deep down there is the fundamental part of me that says ‘you are not enough as you are’. This is the very thrust of the social identity in action, that belief that I only earn my right to be happy if I meet the long list of expectations placed upon me. And of course if I do meet them and get my good feelings I then have to restart the process to get the next fix, very much a hamster on the wheel situation.
The conditioned wisdom is that one gets to be happy by being a someone, achieving something, it is granted to me if only I follow the rules laid out by humanity, it is clear why this kind of reward/punishment system is used to control the ‘being’ that exists in each human.
The funny thing to contemplate is that it is only real because I have been willingly playing along with the game, the wisdom of humanity appearing to be set in concrete when it is not.
Right now there is this hesitation, there is the draw towards naiveté, the shift towards naiveté is experienced as if I have been looking out of this dirty, muddy window my whole life. Then all of a sudden the window is wiped clean, There is still the window, the ‘me’ but it is a different ‘me’. From that clean place I am able to act in a way that is original and genuine.
On the other side there is that familiar fear of ‘something will go terribly wrong!!!’, it is familiar because I remember this fear from the very beginning, whenever I would contemplate stepping out ‘my’ firm outlines, it would be there, only to disappear later when it is seen that there was actually never any danger to begin with.
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It seems telling to me that not only has your goal been to successfully submit someone who is very athletic (already not an easy feat!) but to do it ‘with ease,’ which is first of all already moving the baseline, but second of all a subjective measure. We’ve all seen the cliches in kung-fu films of masters submitting opponents without hardly moving a muscle, which seems the logical conclusion of such an ideal
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Yes @henryyyyyyyyyy haha that is the exact archetype I am taking about with this martial arts fantasy
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It reminds me of spiritual masters who are not satisfied by one person loving them, they need a group. And then of course the group is never large enough, it must continue to grow and grow… there must be ever-more worship & adoration… even a group of millions is not enough, the whole world must love me! And then when the promises of the master don’t make the followers feel ecstasy it is never the fault of the master or the teachings, it is the fault of the follower, who must eternally double down on the teachings, they must be ‘doing something wrong.’
But of course it doesn’t work because human nature is just too recalcitrant, and the promises of the master are too outlandish, not connected to something genuine. No wonder they always move the baseline to some afterlife
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Yes it is the same game being played out, the question that is currently running through my mind is why I reject that which is genuine and instead continue pursuing the game of being someone special.
I can see this theme playing out in other scenarios too, for example with the hen party jobs I do. There is a certain ‘high’ that I get when I see that I am desired by the girls at the events, it makes me feel special, like ‘I’ am ‘right’ after all!
And yet their desire is more to do with them than me, I just happen to be at the right place at the right time, yet I so desperately seek to be special.
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The other thing that has just come to my attention is the difference between the words special and unique.
I want to be special which always implies a hierarchy, I wish to stand apart from others and this expresses itself in the hierarchical structure, being more than the other, or fearing being less than the other.
Whereas unique is clean, because being unique allows equity. The pursuit of being special leads to conflict and away from intimacy.
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So the past few days I have been getting good success by looking at responsibility and obligation. How this whole thing came about is quite cool too.
My mum lived in New Zealand during the time when I started with Actualism so she remembered the grumpy and miserable me that she left in England. When she came back to the UK recently she immediately noticed something big has changed, that miserable Kuba was no longer about haha. She has always been very interested in ‘alternative’ things, so when she asked I took the chance to introduce some Actualism to her.
I never made into a ‘thing’, we just had lots and lots of long discussions about life and about what it is that I have been doing to change. I even printed out a copy of the Actualism diagram for her and explained the method.
At first when we would discuss there would be lots and lots of sticking points, but she was still interested, she could see there was something here that makes sense. Each time we met she would say that she has thought about and applied the things we have been discussing and she now agrees. Since then she has come back to me many times with various realisations she has had and she has commented how so many various issues have improved for her. She is currently like a secret Actualist, she is doing it!
She is big into nutrition and pushing a healthy lifestyle and last time we spoke we got onto the topic of why I personally have little interest in those things. That there is a much bigger issue at hand which I am focusing on, the root cause of human misery and anguish. Living in reality is a grim and glum business so of course people turn to and abuse food, alcohol or what have you in order to put up with being here. Without the ‘me’ that is the spanner in the works the need for various forms of control via diet and lifestyle changes are no longer necessary.
We then got onto discussing the reasons why living in the real world is such a grim and glum business and one of the things that came up is the sense of obligation and responsibility that is conditioned into each individual. This obligation and responsibility clouds the naiveté and zest for living that we all remember as children, I made the example of my 5 year old brother who demonstrates this so well every time I see him.
But then my mum said well of course your 5 year old brother has no responsibility, he does not have to look after himself, he has no job, no family etc.
But then again I personally do not feel great responsibility to go to work, I go to work because I need money to pay for essentials, it simply makes sense, and the same for looking after myself. Why the need to use this emotionally sourced construct of - responsibility.
She disagreed at first but with more examples she got it! she could see that responsibility is like a moral filter that we project onto the world of people things and events, and that it can actually be removed from ones life. Without responsibility/obligation I make choices because they are the sensible choices, the great thing about this is that it stops resentment.
Because responsibility/obligation come from the outside, they are a means of control, therefore they inevitably lead to resentment. Autonomy means that each choice is made because it is the best choice I can make, then resentment also disappears.
Since that talk, these 2 words (obligation/responsibility) have been on my mind all the time. Because from the conversation I noticed that there is still many avenues in my life where responsibility and obligation play a big role.
The main thing I saw the other day is that without responsibility/obligation I am no longer afraid of how things will turn out, this leads to freedom from worry and freedom from the constant urge to ‘control the future’.
However it does not mean I stop caring, actually it allows me to care more. One way (perhaps a little weak) I can describe it is that it shifts the focus from being outcome oriented into being process oriented. As in it is impossible to reach into the future and guarantee an outcome (responsibility relentlessly asks one to do this impossible feat though!).
Without responsibility I am free to focus on this moment which is happening right now and to function in the optimum right now. After-all this is the only thing that I can actually do. Without the fear of getting things ‘wrong’ I am free to apply my intelligence to the task at hand and to delight in doing so as well.
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A very helpful post Kuba. Thanks for sharing your insights. 
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So things are going pretty well lately, things appear to be falling away bit by bit. There is something that still remains though that I wanted to write about, it is what I am currently looking into. It seems again to relate back to obligation.
In general there appears to be a fear of being me as I am, of being genuine. It expresses itself when I write here, when I coach, when I do anything that involves the perceived expectations that others place on me.
There is a niggling fear of ‘getting it wrong’, of ‘not being good enough’, of ‘letting them down’, not living up to ‘their’ expectations. Even though those ‘expectations’ are actually a projection of my own internal world, of my own beliefs and fantasies.
It is another one of them so familiar feelings because it has been with me for so long, it seems to be part of the bedrock of what it means to be a social identity.
I guess the other thing is that when I have been investing into being a fake for so long, to attempt to be genuine seems dangerous, because I am purposefully exposing all those fantasies that I have been hiding behind, my fabricated sense of security and authority which comes from being a ‘someone’ is being shattered.
The fear is that anyone and everyone in my life will reject the me that is genuine, because he is no longer ‘that’. Even writing this though I can see this is a furphy, because when I am no longer a ‘someone’ I can be a fellow human being, I can live in equity and intimacy and is this not what we all want deep down?
Furthermore do I really believe that they all buy into the persona that I present as the real me? It seems that actually this whole drama has NOTHING to do with others, and ALL to do with my own projections. Is anything actually being given up when I am genuine, or is it that I simply stop pretending and playing a silly game?
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I think the funny actuality of it is that most people won’t even notice any difference 
.
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Yeah haha this is exactly what I was thinking.
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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