Richard: To get out of stuckness and induce a Pure Consciousness Experience one gets off one’s backside and does whatever one knows best to activate delight. Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity/ innocuity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all … and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now.
What about people who don’t feel well physically? Unless one is really “well balanced”, most of us have some “sore” points where we can feel the body “complaining” when being in the present and it’s can be quite challenging to get in a feel-good state. That’s also why a lot of people use escapism via alcohol, food, etc. in order to “feel good” which I suppose it’s different to the feeling we are after here.
Is it possible to induce a feeling of well-being in a body that is not in a good physical shape which would result to PCE?
It’s not a prerequisite – I can speak from experience as I had a PCE while seasick on a boat (which is certainly a state of not being physically well).
Also feeling good is not a prerequisite either. And I can speak from experience as I had a PCE directly from a state of extreme emotional upset – it was quite an experience to see that ‘upset’ entirely vanish along with ‘me’ to the point where there wasn’t even anyone that could have something done to them such as to be upset about!
So in my experience a huge component of ‘not feeling well physically’ is actually the affective layer.
As a feeling being ‘I’ cannot help but experience life affectively, which means things like feeling well or unwell physically will always have an affective tinge to them which is usually the problematic part.
This is something that is quite hard to relate to but you can observe in yourself that when you are feeling happy and harmless there is an ease in the body, even if there is pain for example.
I train a lot of martial arts and what I have found as I continued practicing actualism is that I ‘feel physically well’ even after hard and gruelling training sessions, with injuries, when low on sleep etc. Even though in the past I would have said “I feel bad because I am physically unwell.” But actually it was the affective response that changed the whole perception of how my body feels.
Actually this also makes me think of that typical contrast of a young child that is full of energy and the old grumpy and moaning man that has had enough of it. They both experience their physical bodies completely differently :
One is full of energy, supple, keen to play etc, the other one moans at having to move and is always complaining about being too tired How much of the difference is down to the actual body deteriorating and how much is down to the fact that there is a completely different affective response - it is as if they both exist in different realities, 1 is naive and fun and 1 is grim and gloomy.
The main point is that as an identity ‘I’ arise out of the affective faculty, ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’. This means that the only way ‘I’ can experience life as a feeling being is affectively (via feelings, emotions or instinctual passions)
Emotion is physically hard on the body as well, whether because existing emotionally leads to not taking care of the body very well, or the hormone dumps themselves are toxic to the tissues making up the body. One of the people on the AFT describes experiencing physical ‘bruising’ after going through difficult emotions. There is a physical soreness.
There are also soreness and injuries that come from tensing muscles over time because of stressors
Being a ‘me’ is a bum deal!
I do think that there may be benefit to eating well (for example, as you mention in another thread) as another way to feel better and better, but it is certainly not a necessity. Sometimes it’s useful to take care of some of these practical things to make one’s life nicer, which might make doing the actualism method easier. But it is far from a prerequisite. In fact, sometimes there is even greater confidence which comes from success at feeling good despite difficult circumstances (for example @claudiu having a PCE while seasick!).
It is like the release of cortisol in the flight or fight mechanism. Cortisol can build up and have deleterious effects to the body.
As I am starting to be more felicitous. I noticed when I now have a strong emotion like the day of my important work meeting, I feel so much more tired/fatigued afterwards.
I have had a lot of recurrent muscle injuries in my neck and back since being run over and being stressed and anxious seriously exacerbates and makes it worse.
I find as I get more felicitous and more frequent EE’s my appetite seems to drop off. Like so much of my eating is sort of emotional rather than necessary.
I must say that I have a very difficult time being happy and harmless while experiencing physical pain. It often seems impossible for me. The best I can manage is be be somewhat neutral.
Very, very tricky for me.
Then I had quite some problems with “low energy states” like bodily fatigue (not mental).
I also had this “energy hole” between 12am and 14pm where I was just “down”. This I could stabilize through a better diet.
I could sum it up as: When the body “suffers” I suffer and make it even worse.
Indeed.
I was fortunate enough to have the same old chronic aches and pains during PCEs and they really are experienced differently. So when not in PCE, habituation to feeling good/very good/great while enjoying and appreciating is key to experience physical pain differently.
I struggle a lot with this too, especially as being ill or in pain always sees to trigger a base level of anxiety. As well an obsessive attention to every symptom, my internal sensations then dominate my perception.
I am starting to make some improvements at this. Unknown and unfamiliar pains seem to trigger me more though, because I don’t know the cause and effect, my mind wanders to possible conditions…
I used to think that maybe pain would provide some means to push through to a PCE, like the extreme reaction to physical suffering could then give way and make a PCE happen.
I think I though this because of 2 of my PCE’s coming after intense emotional arguments, like maybe there was validity to experience intense emotions just to come out ok at the other side. So, for some reason I thought maybe the same would happen with pain but it hasn’t yet lol.
How much of the difference is down to the actual body deteriorating and how much is down to the fact that there is a completely different affective response - it is as if they both exist in different realities, 1 is naive and fun and 1 is grim and gloomy.