quote from geoffrey before AF , thanks to @John
That’s it. Nothing else needed… than what I marked in bold.
I keep causing confusion and I keep letting myself walk astray with my ‘problems’, but this approach of applying bodily awareness only (which makes sense to me) is what I need to get back to at all times - without me turning this into some commandment/morals
…edited : geoffrey is saying in a post below that this post maybe misleading . and it is better to read Richard’s article
Nice this is the same stuff I have been coming to lately. Also this is precisely what Richard writes in the ASA article :
one reaches apperceptiveness by being ever more sensuous and one activates sensuousness by being ever more attentive … and one activates attentiveness by no longer ‘feeling good’.
Also
In attentiveness, there is an unbiased observing of the constant showing-up of the ‘reality’ within and is examining the feelings arising one after the other … and such attentiveness is the ending of its grip. Please note that last point: in attentiveness, there is an observance of the ‘reality’ within, and such attention is the end of its embrace … finish
So ‘I’ as the doer don’t really do much in this whole thing haha, perhaps the only thing ‘I’ have to do is continually allow attentiveness at the slightest diminution of feeling good, and even that can become automatic, so then maybe the only thing ‘I’ do is get out of the way 
But I was playing with exactly what Geoffrey described yesterday, so there was some emotion that came up and initially I tried to take the route of ‘trying to feel good’ and it had exactly this flavour of ‘moving the internal cursor’, of being engaged in some kind of power struggle in myself. So I did this for a few minutes and I realised that it was a dead end.
Then I went back to doing what I usually do which is allowing attentiveness whilst ‘being’ that emotion fully. This can be a little more ‘turbulent’ as I am no longer suppressing the emotion but rather allowing it to be lived fully, however it actually works, as in this attentiveness is actively chipping away at whatever affective phenomena are in the way.
So is all that ‘I’ do merely allowing ‘myself’ to be seen fully without moving in either direction?
Leila, thanks for posting this. Re your quote - I’m wondering if calling it ‘bodily’ awareness might create a confusion i.e. being aware of only the sensations associated with feelings / emotions. In my experience it might lead to dissociation from my feelings as opposed to allowing myself to be feeling myself as directly as possible… so affective awareness is a better term as it includes feelings and their associated sensations.
Sorry if this seems like a semantic remark but I’ve struggled with this in the past so I thought it’s worth clarifying
Thanks Almog .
Yes ,i agree with you .
knowing that geoffrey was writing this ,when he was in out from control virtual freedom .edited : i made a mistake he was not in virtual freedom .
so for new commers , it is going to be : " allowing myself to fully feel my emotions as directly as possible" at this moment .
and when you progress you become aware more of the sensations in your body associated with feelings ( which will help you to know a feeling is arising etc.) . and when one’s awareness fully developed , 1 affective awareness and 2 bodily awareness ( hearing , looking , etc. ) ,the awareness of all these 1 and 2 , is me at this moment . me = this body
as Richard’s example eating Hemberger :
( …) all this and more – the awareness of all this happening – is me at-this-moment.
[Richard]: “By appreciating the fact that, at this moment of biting into this hamburger, this is the only moment that I am actually alive. All past ‘me’s and all future ‘me’s have no actuality at all. I am only ever here, now. Likewise, all past hamburgers and all future hamburgers do not exist at this moment … they are either memory or expectation and have no substantial existence. Of all the hamburgers I have ever eaten or will ever eat, only this one actually exists. This hamburger and I – and all that is around and about me at this moment – are it what we are living for. To experience this moment in time and this place in space fully is the whole point of existence. I am the universe experiencing itself as a sensate, reflective human being … and I am biting into a hamburger. The taste buds on the tongue are relishing the explosion of sensation; the nasal receptors are satisfying their ability to smell the delicious aromas that waft endlessly past; the eyes are delighting in the colours and the form of whatever is in view; the ears are pleasing themselves in being able to hear the sounds of this moment’s happenings; the fingertips are enjoying the touch of the texture of this hamburger; the skin is gratifying itself with the feel of the air all about … all this and more – the awareness of all this happening – is me at-this-moment. I do not exist over time or from place to place. I am only ever here now […next ten paragraphs elided…]. I am completely happy to be here, securely inside time and space, eating this hamburger”. (Richard, List A, No. 15, No.09).
i saw geoffrey is writing a reply in this thread , and all of a sudden i felt a panic attack , my body was shaking , i was full of fear and anxiety . i thought :oh leila maybe you did a mistake by putting geoffrey’s writing here.
this is amazing ( amazement ) as how this emotional memory works .
something that used to be important for animal survival now it is causing separation between me and actuality ( factuality )
the fact that i am not in any danger , but i feel as if there is a physical danger .
The message you quoted was posted on Slack the 30th of March 2017 (link - sadly only available for people with an old zulip account).
‘I’ was not in an out-from-control virtual freedom at that time - nor in an in-control virtual freedom by the way, and probably not even an ‘actualist’ by any meaningful definition (such as having made the commitment to feel good whatever may come).
The only time where ‘I’ might have been said to be in an out-from-control virtual freedom was that one week before ‘my’ self-immolation: the first week on September 2018.
If there is any merit to that post of mine you quoted, it only comes from its obvious source: the ASA article.
By the way it is quite the find to unearth a post of mine about this particular article, seeing that ‘I’ was never a huge fan of it.
First, for its uncharacteristic style - which comes from its history (Richard’s rewrite of a chapter on mindfulness by Bhante Gunaratana, see e.g. this)
Second, for the accusations of plagiarism this undisclosed history led to, which although unjustified (see Richard’s answers to another such accusation regarding Alan Watts), nevertheless threw an unnecessary shade on the undeniable new-ness of actualism, and the originality of its discoverer’s writings.
Third, for the never-ending flow of misunderstandings, appropriations, and straight spread-of-peace-on-earth endangerments that came from people (mis-)reading exclusively, or almost exclusively, this article for their information about what actualism is: see the whole history of the ‘Affer’ movement.
In short, the few times I was asked what were my favourite articles or correspondences from the AFT website, or more importantly which were instrumental in my becoming actually free, I never mentioned this article. I’d rather advise people to read the TMOBA article.
And then to read it again.
ok , i will delete it then .
What? why would you delete it?
ok i wont delete it then . i will edit mine .
Then my answer won’t make any sense hahaha
you are right 
ok i wont edit .
but i dont want to look bad 
It’s fine. I’m not sure how you could have known the date it was posted, if you don’t have access to the archive.
Nor are you supposed to know the dates at which that guy ‘Geoffrey’ was virtually free or not. That is not part of the required curriculum of actualism hahaha
That correction just had to be made, not to mislead people.
Nothing against you 
in the example of eating hamburger above
and about " appreciation " , what i get is that , it has a lot of layers .
as henry said it , in his writing " question about sensuousness : " (…) It’s helpful to think of it in terms of a spectrum."
the way that makes sense to me about appreciation meaning : first attention , then acknowledging ,wondering , marveling( being curious about like how ) , then amazement WOW.
the amazement is the last step in Srinath 's writings about PCE practice , that brings more naivete , and causes more intimacy ( and more naivety brings more amazement ) .
so first acknowledging as Richard wrote in the above example of eating hamburger : " By appreciating( acknowledging ) the fact that, at this moment of biting into this hamburger, this is the only moment that I am actually alive."
the second for appreciation is being surprised?( wondering and marveling ) : " Of all the hamburgers I have ever eaten or will ever eat, only this one actually exists. This hamburger and I – and all that is around and about me at this moment – are it what we are living for."
then amazement brings intimacy via increased naivety : " that me and this hamburger and all that is around become intimate with less separation : " I am the universe experiencing itself as a sensate, reflective human being … and I am biting into a hamburger
all this and more – the awareness of all this happening – is me at-this-moment."
and as Geoffrey is saying : " taking time" to be amazed at the sensuous experience . " taking time" is the most important part in appreciation .even when one looks at a flower , by taking time for this sensuous experience , to become amazed at it all .
That’s interesting, I always seem to be drawn more to the ASA article as it seems to be a more ‘mechanical’ description, it’s as if the ASA article is describing the method on a lower level of abstraction vs TMOBA.
But then I can see how this could lead one to turn Actualism into some kind of meditative/mindfullness practice, whereas TMOBA in comparison has the flavour of getting all of oneself involved with the method.
That’s it for my scholarly assessment anyways
I read through the TMOBA article to see why it is that I don’t seem to get much out of it these days and there is 1 bit that stood out :
And, of course, once one does get the knack of this, one up-levels ‘feeling good’, as a bottom line each moment again, to ‘feeling happy and harmless’
… and after that to ‘feeling excellent’.
This is the 1 thing I haven’t done and I am wondering if this is why I have felt somewhat stagnant with the method for a while now.
I tried just now to replace the target of feeling good with the target of feeling happy and harmless and there was this immediate sense of an impetus to move towards it, which I haven’t experienced for a while.
Seeing just how wonderful it can get it is indeed wasting this moment of being alive not to live it, it was like “why would I merely feel good when I can feel happy and harmless”.
I guess I always thought the baseline would shift onto the next level by itself but maybe there is a need for an active commitment to living something ‘even better’, all the way through to perfection.
“When I first started to become aware of how these affective feelings operate (both mine and others) in my daily life I was astounded at how my interactions with fellow human beings were indeed feeling interactions. I also started to become aware of the fact that these feeling communications could be both transmitted and received without any verbal communication whatsoever. I became aware of the fact that I could detect the mood (the feeling that someone was feeling and transmitting) the moment they walked in the door, even before they opened their mouth and said anything. I then became aware of the fact that I also invariably transmitted my own feelings to others in exactly the same way – the experiential understanding that I along with the rest of humanity am a feeling being – which in turn led me to acknowledge that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’.
Once an ongoing awareness revealed how all human beings communicate by overtly transmitting and receiving feelings the next thing that I became aware of were the less obvious means of affective-feeling communications – communication via psychic vibes or psychic currents. Quite often the stronger the feelings are that the person is feeling and the more they want to keep their feelings hidden from others, the more likely it is that they will transmit their feelings via invisible psychic currents. I say invisible because in these cases there are quite often no obvious clues to be had in the tone of voice or appearance or body language and so on as to what the other is feeling – and in some cases the other may not even be aware of having the feeling themselves. But the feeling is there nevertheless and because the feeling is there as an undercurrent as it were, the feeling will most likely be received only as an undercurrent.
This undercurrent of psychic vibes is murky business indeed as it most often operates at an unconsciousness level, i.e. it operates underneath the ‘radar’ of normal awareness. It is also murky in that is one can never be sure what the other is feeling by reading the overt signs, which means that one has to revert to guesswork as to what the other is really feeling. Once I became aware of this I saw the utter futility of attempting to know with certainty what any other person was actually feeling at any time so I eventually gave up this ingrained, instinctual and automatic habit – the habit of having one’s psychic radar always ‘on’ as a method of ‘self’-defence against likely predators, in this case all of one’s fellow human beings. This in turn helped me focus my attentiveness exclusively on my own feelings – what I was feeling right now in this moment and what feelings I was either overtly or covertly transmitting to others.
I do acknowledge that it is somewhat difficult for people to really get in touch with their feelings in order to be able to see how feelings operate – how they are transmitted, how they are received, the pivotal role they play in human communication, the overt affective feelings, the covert psychic undercurrents, what triggers various feelings into operation and so on. I know that I had difficulty at first in getting in touch with my feelings, the primary reason being that we human beings are taught that expressing certain feelings is ‘bad’ and we are taught that it is best to repress such feelings by either keeping a lid on them and/or not paying attention to them. A little introspection however revealed that it was not that I didn’t have these feelings, it was simply that I had repressed them, tucked them away, very often so much so that I wasn’t even aware that I was indeed having the feelings at all. I also found that my years on the spiritual path reinforced my notion of being a good person in that I was given licence by the belief inherent in all spiritual teachings that ‘I’ was good and it was ‘others’ who were evil combined with the feeling-fed conviction that ‘I’ had a special insight of the truth and it was others who were ignorant.
I’ll leave it there as this is getting a trifle long, but the main point I am attempting to make is that the only way you can understand how psychic vibes operate is to firstly get in touch with your feelings and then observe how you invariably continuously transmit these feelings to others as well as to feel the feelings that you invariably pick up from others and then observe the manner in which you receive these feelings from others and how these feelings then trigger off feelings in you.
Or to put it another way, it makes no sense to intellectualize about feelings, one needs to feel feelings in order to observe how they operate in action.”
“In general, however, the usual way of verifying whether an ‘active connection’ currently manifesting is indeed pure intent as reported/ described/ explained is to find oneself being sincerely naïve, at the very least, if not to be naïveté itself (i.e., naïveté embodied as ‘me’) – and to be naïveté itself is to be the closest one can come to innocence whilst remaining a ‘self’ (innocence is where ‘self’ is not) whereby one is both likeable and liking for herewith lies tenderness, sweetness and togetherness, closeness – whereupon one is walking through the world in a state of wide-eyed wonder and amazement, simply marvelling at the magnificence of this physical universe’s absoluteness and delighting in its beneficence, its largesse, as if a child again (guileless, artless, ingenuous, innocuous), with a blitheness and a gaiety yet with adult sensibilities (whereby the distinction betwixt being naïve and being gullible is readily separable), such that the likelihood of the magical fairy-tale-like paradise, which this verdant and azure planet actually is, becoming ever-so-sweetly apparent is almost always imminent.”
in the spirit of the third wave:
[Richard]: ‘… one has to want it like one has never wanted anything else before … so much so that all the instinctual passionate energy of desire, normally frittered away on petty desires, is fuelling and impelling/ propelling one into this thing and this thing only (‘impelling’ as in a pulling from the front and ‘propelling’ as in being pushed from behind). There is a ‘must’ to it (one must do it/ it must happen) and a ‘will’ to it (one will do it/ it will happen) and one is both driven and drawn until there is an inevitability that sets in. Now it is unstoppable and all the above ceases of its own accord … one is unable to distinguish between ‘me’ doing it and it happening to ‘me’. One has escaped one’s fate and achieved one’s destiny’.
Richard : Have you never been deep in a rain-forest … or any wilderness, for that matter? Have you ever, as you have travelled deeper and deeper into this other world of natural delight, ever experienced an intensely hushed stillness that is vast and immense yet so simply here? I am not referring to a feeling of awe or reverence or great beauty – to have any emotion or passion at all is to miss the actuality of this moment – nor am I referring to any blissful or euphoric state of being. It is a sensate experience, not an affective state. I am talking about the factual and simple actualness of earthy existence being experienced whilst ambling along without any particular thought in mind … yet not being mindless either. And then, when a sparkling intimacy occurs, do not the woods take on a fairy-tale-like quality? Is one not in a paradisiacal environment that envelops yet leaves one free? This is the ambience that I speak of. At this magical moment there is no ‘I’ in the head or ‘me’ in the heart … there is this apperceptive awareness wherein thought can operate freely without the encumbrance of any feelings whatsoever.
It is not my ambience nor yours … yet it is here for everyone and anyone for the asking … for the daring to be here as this body only. One does this by stepping out of the real world into this actual world, as this flesh and blood body, leaving your ‘self’ behind … where ‘you’ belong.
This ambience delivers the goods so longed for through aeons.