Hi everyone! It’s been a really long time since the last time I wrote something here. I have been reading a lot though, and thoroughly enjoying your posts, which have been invaluable, especially those written by @Vineeto.
Here are some things I wrote in the last couple of days:
I think I am applying the actualism method correctly for the first time. What I mean is that I am enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive willingly for the first time. Before, it was more about passively paying attention to feelings, intellectualising and trying to enjoy this moment of being alive by telling myself “I should be enjoying this” with, of course, limited success. Enjoyment felt like an accidental thing, like something that could only happen “by luck", by some conditions being met, or by discovering some profound, hidden truth about myself. Today, however, it suddenly hit me that I am lucky enough to have come across the method to end human suffering (thanks to accidentally finding the Actual Freedom Trust one day around 7 years ago) and still I am choosing not to apply it. Meaning, I know that enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is the method that will end me, the human condition, with all my violence, fear, sorrow, and all the other harmful aspects that constitute myself, but I have still chosen to do anything but that.
Richard is so clear in his articles, and yet, I seem to have subtly changed the method in my mind as to ensure the application of it would not be successful. Before today, I was unable to go back to enjoying and appreciating this moment willingly, and I can now see that it was because I had decreased the value of the method, and turn enjoying and appreciating into a sort of moral thing that I was reluctant to apply. No wonder why I felt so much resistance every time I asked myself “HAIETMOBA?”. What changed it all for me was to finally see the value of the method, meaning, this is the method that ends human suffering forever, why am I acting like it’s some lacklustre technique?
Since then, every time I feel something other than enjoyment or appreciation, I say to myself “Aren’t you lucky? You know exactly what to do. Go back to enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive.” And then, enjoyment comes back so easily, and I can investigate what triggered me, and that kind of investigation feels effortless and fruitful, as opposed to trying to investigate when feeling bad, which leads nowhere. And the best thing is that applying the method brings great results instantly, cause here I am, enjoying and appreciating my life, when only a few moments ago I was suffering for some silly thing.
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Last night I got quite angry for a very silly reason, and today when I woke up I could see that after having a strong, undesirable emotion, what follows is usually a subtle dip into sorrow, accompanied by thoughts such as “I’ll never be able to change myself” or “I haven’t changed one bit, I am still the same rotten human being”. However, today I could spot that that’s just a belief, and went back to enjoying and appreciating, and it’s soooo good.
From this vantage point of feeling good, I can explore all the silly beliefs that triggered me last night. When I compare any emotion to feeling good, the choice is obvious, why would I spend my life feeling bad when I could be feeling good?
In short, I have made the application of the actualism method so much more difficult than it needs to be. Enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is the actualism method. I know I am stating the obvious, but it feels like I can see this clearly for the first time, almost like I have been reading the same thing over and over, but it finally sank in.
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Another thing I want to add is that I realised that all this time, I’ve been applying a technique to explore emotions that I learned many years ago, which has been getting in the way with the actualism method. It is based on the belief that you need to stay with a feeling and “go to the bottom of it” by feeling it out in order to “get rid of it” (hello dissociation, my old friend). This has led to hours of feeling sorrow and other unpleasant emotions out in the hope that just feeling them out would change them. I somehow turned the actualism method into a sort of stoic method of enduring unpleasant emotions, meaning, I would ask HAIETMOBA, and then feel the emotion out, and basically suffer until it went on its own or until I distracted myself or dissociated. I can now see that is not part of the actualism method, and it’s very clear why I had turned my actualism journey into such an unpleasant experience.
Pro tip for myself: apply the method as it is, do not add or withdraw things from it.