Seeing this, the following option opens up:
Well, if I am what’s making work feel unpleasant, shouldn’t I stop doing what I am currently doing?
That seems like the sensible thing to do.
You’re telling me I was the thing prevening work from being fun all this time??
…Yeah, mate!
Yeah, and it can be fun to find the deep instinctual roots (like fear of death, fear of being alone, fear of madness) underneath a domestic conflict that seems superficial at first. If 'm upset by something and it doesn’t go away easily after seeing the apparent silliness of it, there’s definitely something worth digging into.
I’ve been surprised a few times by this lately. I won’t bore you with the details, but dealing with someone suffering from dementia hits some interesting triggers. The interesting thing is, when I can trace those feelings to their deepest root (and it’s an actual process of discovery, not an intellectual shortcut), it’s surprisingly freeing.
Obviously the deep passions are still there waiting to be activated again, but seeing how a trivial event has stirred them into action, it’s like, wow, that’s surprising, that’s interesting! I’ve been surprised to find how much relief can follow from just seeing that (as well as boosting my motivation to go all the way).
Pondering on fictional problems and feeling anxiety about things that never come to be (Zen master wannabe style):
Emotions create problems
and offer themselves as solutions;
To be aware of this is to see the silliness of it all.
I create problems
and offer myself as the solution;
To be aware of this is to see the silliness of it all.
Most mornings, I feel a bit of anxiety before work. I start to fantasize that somehow, something I did was wrong, and I begin to fear receiving a message from either my boss or the manager saying I’m fired or something—lol. Of course, there’s no evidence that anything should be wrong; it all stems from a feeling. Recognizing the silliness of feeling anxious for no apparent reason helps diminish the feeling, but it does take a while to fade some days. Pondering this today, I realized that I believe in emotions. I can tell myself ‘emotions are not facts,’ but the truth is, I do believe them. I think this stems from my spiritualist years, when ‘having a hunch’ about something or someone was actually considered a valuable thing, almost like a superpower. In my early 20s, I had a fascination with intuitive characters and sought to develop that part of myself. It’s also been a big part of my personality to ‘see people’s true intentions’ or ‘see them for who they truly are.’ I now see that much of that is about trusting what I feel as if it were a fact, meaning feeling has been my compass in life, especially when dealing with people and possible future events.
How silly.
Exploring anxiety, I’m seeing for the first time how trust is enmeshed in the emotion; the moment you stop trusting fear or anxiety, they lose most of its power. Like, right now, seeing this, my anxiety went from a 6 to a 1 in a second.
Haha, the elegance of those verses…
I’ve been wanting to reply to this for a few days but I’ve been in the process of resolving this experientially for myself.
I can relate to this sense in which I believe in my feelings. Affective phenomena have this way of capturing attention completely, they carry this power to dictate themselves as the truth. It makes sense as they are there to motivate behaviour.
What I have found though is that it is possible to eventually start seeing through the deception, to get to a point where you are no longer a believer, where you see that a feeling is not a fact.
I have found that it takes a persistent and diligent attentiveness applied over a period of time to get to this point, the kind of attentiveness that is described in the ASA article on the AFT.
At first when a new issue surfaces it’s this big and complex psychological + psychic structure. At this point one is likely ‘sold’ on the drama, both the feeler and the thinker are weaving the deception. But attentiveness is applied and eventually this thing gets chipped away until only raw affect remains.
Then it gets to this interesting point where you no longer have any ‘good reason’ (social identity) to feel a particular way but that feeling is certainly still there, and it commands attention, it places itself as the truth.
I think this is the trickiest part of any exploration because there is no longer any formula, and this raw affect is quite intense to experience, this is the deep sea diving stage.
What I have found though is that at this point I do 2 things. 1 - I allow myself to ‘be’ that feeling fully, no longer engaging in any escapism or distraction. 2 - I simply apply this persistent and diligent attentiveness, this is experiencing ‘myself’ at the very core of ‘being’.
Now if I can stick with it (even though at first it can seem like nothing is happening) I notice that the deception eventually gets exposed.
It’s like I am experiencing this raw affect on one hand whilst simultaneously being aware of the facts of the situation, now it’s not ‘me’ being aware of the facts, the brain does this automatically, ‘I’ only focus on experiencing ‘myself’ fully.
Sooner or later something clicks, and the affective phenomena are seen with clarity to be a blind and crude response, ie it has nothing to do with facts.
This can be extremely freeing at times, and sometimes it goes all the way through to a point where I see that all of the dramas that ‘I’ have suffered literally rest on nothing - a feeling is not a fact.
It’s also fascinating to contemplate that all of reality is supported by this very same deception, which means it also rests on absolutely nothing, and this is possible to see first hand.
Some more observations from how this has played out for me so far. I have noticed that certain dramas (especially the persistent ones) have remained simply because I could not help but feel a certain way in certain situations.
So for example if I am afraid of public speaking, the drama at core is sustained by the fact that each time I find myself in such a situation there is an automatic affective response. Once I am flooded with the fear then all the reasons/justifications for why it is so begin to appear, and then come the reactionary responses etc.
The problem is that all the tried and true methods only gloss over the top and fail to address this fundamental problem. Even trying to investigate beliefs can have one spinning around in a circle, you just cannot deny the strength of the emotion which has been blindly activated and continues to do so each time a similar event takes place, or even just the thought of it comes up.
The cool thing I am observing is that when I apply the kind of attentiveness described in my previous post, eventually that automatic affective response is no longer activated, it kind of wears itself out, because I have felt all there is to it and seen first hand that all is well regardless, so all in all it is no longer necessary.
Now a super cool thing happens when I find myself in a situation where that affective response is no longer activated. This blind affective response was the core building block of the entire drama, which means without it the rest of the drama has nothing to rest upon, it disappears.
So all in all it is feeling good which changes things about.
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.
——
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.
——
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.
Hey @pelagash that is such a wonderful discovery. The thrust of your post - that enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive is ultimately precious (if only recognised and appreciated as such) reminds me of the below writing from Richard :
There is something precious in living itself. Something beyond compare. Something more valuable than any ‘King’s ransom’. It is not rare gemstones; it is not singular works of art; it is not the much-prized bags of money; it is not the treasured loving relationships; it is not the highly esteemed Blissful States Of ‘Being’ … … it is not any of these things usually considered precious. There is something ultimately precious. It is the essential character of the infinitude of the universe … which is the life-giving foundation of all that is apparent. That something precious is me as-I-am … me as I actually am as distinct from ‘me’ as ‘I’ really am. I am the universe’s experience of itself. The limpid and lucid perfection and purity of being here now, as-I-am, is akin to the crystalline perfection and purity seen in a dew-drop hanging from the tip of a leaf in the early-morning sunshine; the sunrise strikes the transparent dew-drop with its warming rays, highlighting the flawless correctness of the tear-drop shape with its bellied form. One is left almost breathless with wonder at the immaculate simplicity so exemplified … and everyone I have spoken with has experienced this impeccable purity and perfection in some way or another at varying stages in their life. Is it not impossible to conceive – and just too difficult to imagine – that this is one’s essential character? One has to be daring enough to live it … for it is both one’s audacious birth-right and adventurous destiny.
‘I’ may not have access to the above however the method is an imitative method, this is what ‘I’ can imitate via enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive affectively, and of course the experience of actual perfection and purity then becomes ever more imminent.
Indeed it is no little thing, not merely some ‘positive thinking psychology’ or something like that, ‘I’ am inching to that something ultimately precious.
It also reminds me of @Vineeto’s invitations to “join the party”, this something ultimately precious is where the party is at. It is an open invitation too, the party is already always taking place now 
.
Pelagash: 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. 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.
Hi Pelagash,
It’s a pleasure to read your post, describing exactly what you missed out on with the actualism method and why, and how you discovered to apply it correctly. You are absolute correct – the actualism method is so simple and exactly this simplicity is what takes time to discover by discarding all one’s previously learned techniques which are in the way. As you say –
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.
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.
This is a most valuable observation as that technique “to stay with a feeling” is very, very common and only too often applied in the mistaken belief that it would help, when it only prolongs the misery.
Your “pro tip” is priceless –
Pro tip for myself: apply the method as it is, do not add or withdraw things from it.
I am reminded of a story I saw in a documentary many years ago – a manufacturer of a cake mixture was puzzled why they received reports that housewives had so many failures to produce the perfect cake when the ingredients in the packet were just right. They did an extensive survey, and lo and behold, learnt that almost all housewives added one or two ingredients to the mixture, such a milk or cream or an egg etc., and naturally the dough was then too heavy to rise as needed. It seems to be a common human trait to always having to add something of my own to any advice/recipe because I simply cannot believe that someone else’s formula can already be perfect.
Long story short, the manufacturer changed their recipe for the cake mixture, with a new instruction to add an egg to the mixture for the perfect cake – it worked, lol.
However, the actualism method still works perfectly only when you “do not add or withdraw things from it”. Sometimes this takes years to figure out.
Cheers Vineeto