Frank quoted: (link)
[Respondent]: ‘It has taken me a hell of a long time to understand the difference between having feelings and being those feelings. Because I have not clearly understood this, I’ve never quite got the hang of paying attention to feelings without praise or blame, and without notions of innocence and culpability, right and wrong, etc getting in the way.
This makes things very interesting. The moment I regard my ‘self’ as ‘having’ a feeling, I’m split down the middle and there’s a secondary reaction on the part of the social identity (an urge to “do something” about the feeling, which in turn evokes more feelings, and so on). Conversely, if I recognise that I am the feeling, it most often dissolves into thin air – and usually pretty quickly too.
This is great. It’s especially helpful with regard to anger and frustration which have been two of my biggest hurdles to date. Previously, when I caught myself being angry, annoyed or frustrated, identifying and paying attention to this feeling would NOT cause it to disappear. On the contrary, the feeling and the awareness of myself as ‘having’ it would sometimes become like a microphone and amplifier locked into a screaming feedback loop.
I’m really pleased that this is no longer happening. It seems almost too easy’. [emphasis in original]. (Thursday 28/10/2004 6:55 PM AEST).
[Richard]: And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is. (Richard, AF List, No. 60g, 30 Oct 2005a).
Hi Frank,
I too find this is such an excellent quote, almost obligatory for every practicing actualist who is looking for the knack to get back to feeling good after a diminishment of feeling good.
It takes courage and naiveté to acknowledge that ‘I’ am indeed ‘my’ feelings, that ‘I’ am this swirling vortex of instinctual passions expressing themselves in an array of feelings. And yet, magically, just as No. 60 describes, once you do that, you can change how you feel. You can’t change your feelings by remote (by saying I have feelings), like they are somewhere in a sock-drawer and you just change them from red to blue. No, you have to genuinely admit that all these ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings are what ‘you’ are, and then you can choose how you feel – pure magic! And as Richard emphasized in your quote – “And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is.”
Here is another quote I found useful when, once feeling good, one tracks one’s emotions in order to find out what is behind a stubborn pattern repeating itself –
GARY: I gave some thought as to whether I am ‘tracking’ the waking entity, and I think I am. I seem to go over the same emotions over and over again and the same repetitive thoughts until I give up the chase and relax, often to but take up the tracking the next day.
RICHARD: If it be not fun to track oneself in all of one’s doings then one might as well ‘give up the chase and relax’ … however what you describe as a modus operandi does not make sense to me (‘go over the same emotions over and over again and the same repetitive thoughts until I give up the chase and relax’).
To need to (and to be able to) ‘relax’ means there must be tension in the first place to relax from … thus the tracking down has changed from tracking down the ‘same emotions’ or the ‘same repetitive thoughts’ to tracking down the tension … and you did not notice that the game had changed horses in mid-stream. The need to ‘relax’ is a flashing red light that the game-play has changed: ‘when did this tension start?’; how did this tension begin?’; ‘what was the event that initiated this tension?’; ‘what were the feelings at the time?’; ‘what was the thought associated with that feeling?’ … and so on. Usually one has only to track back a few minutes or a few hours … yesterday afternoon at the most. Then one is free from both the tension and the ‘Tried and True’ cure of ‘relax’.
Speaking personally, I never relaxed in all those years of application and diligence, patience and perseverance … upon exposure to the bright light of awareness the tension always disappeared. [emphasis added]. (Richard, AF List, Gary, 28 Jan 2001)
‘I’ can be very tricky to avoid attention about ‘my’ favourite problems … but then such an added challenge can be also increased fun in chasing the culprit (better than any fiction murder mystery).
Cheers Vineeto