Hi Roy,
Not at all! It was thoroughly enjoyable to write it, and it’s even more delightful to have a correspondent who not only engages with the conversation but is putting what’s discussed into practice as well!
I particularly enjoyed reading your latest two posts as it indicates you’re really on the right track, having changed the focus of your investigation to the negative feelings as the main culprit, rather than the negative thoughts – and you have already found that this is an active and engaged process as opposed to a passive or lackadaisical one.
I also like your post about the article on how to follow a thought to its conclusion – it really explains it well and it shows how thinking something through can be a delightful and enjoyable process. Thoughts really are invaluable as a tool to discover exactly how you tick, in other words, to find out exactly why you feel the way you do, which enables you to then make a choice whether it is sensible to continue feeling that way or whether it is more sensible to feel good, instead. This will enable you to productively use thoughts as a way to really get to the bottom of an issue rather than instinctually circling around in an unproductive manner.
I’ll share some practical advice that I think will be of benefit.
One of the most important things to grasp, which literally took me many years – multiple years, and two visits flying halfway around the world to Australia to visit Richard & Vineeto – is that what the way of living life that has become known as the actualism method[1] actually is is nothing other than consistently enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive.
In other words, it is the consistent enjoyment and appreciation itself that is the actualism method. It is really more an approach to life rather than a instruction recipe to follow per se.
What this means in practical terms is that you know you are applying the method when you are basically feeling good, as in being in a generally good mood – as feeling good facilitates enjoying and appreciating being alive.
The reason this is important is because a lot of people end up (myself included) mistaking the investigation of feelings per se as being the method, or the asking of the question of how they are experiencing being alive as the method. What this would result in is a life spent doing nothing but investigating feelings, which rather requires that you keep having ‘issues’ otherwise you would run out of stuff to investigate! 
But the point is not the investigating, it’s the genuine feeling good, the actual enjoyment and appreication of it all. In other words, if you are consistently feeling good and no trigger has come up to derail this feeling good, then there isn’t actually any need to investigate anything! The whole point of it is to live your life in an optimum a manner as possible.
Coming from a point of frequently feeling not good, with it being common to experience many negative feelings, this might seem completely impossible, like a pipe dream. But rather than discouraging you, the idea here is to have it clearly in mind what exactly you are aiming for. This will motivate your investigations into negative feelings, as in provide a purpose for them, namely, to ensure a more consistent feeling good.
The way to think of it is that even if it feels like there’s way too much stuff to deal with, there really is only a finite set of things that are affecting you. It may feel like a jumble with constant and often overlapping triggers – and it may very well be. But you can approach it methodically. The best way to think of it is to consider a starting point of already feeling good, as being in a basic good mood. This happens naturally whilst living a normal life, even if someone feels bad most of the time, sometimes they will be feeling good. And then you maintain an ongoing affective awareness of how you are feeling. And at some point, when you now find yourself feeling bad, you will realize that the way you were feeling changed from ‘good’ to ‘bad’. And then it is a matter of seeing specifically what caused that change. There is always something – it doesn’t happen for no reason. Even if you may have no idea what it is – it is in there.
This is when stray thoughts can actually be indicative. I remember early on I would frequently have the thoughts like “/thinking X, /thinking Y, hmm now I"m not feeling good. Hmm what can it be? Well it can’t be X because that doesn’t really bother me. And it can’t be Y because I don’t really care about that…” and it turned out that of course, it was exactly X and Y haha. What was happening there is I had a self-image in mind of being “someone who isn’t bothered by X and Y”. But they were bothering me, as evidenced by those things coming up when I was wondering what is bothering me. So eventually I had to give up that self image and accept that I’m basically just like everybody else, which then allowed me to take the next steps.
Another very practical advice is that the investigation actually works the best from a point of feeling good, rather than in the midst of feeling bad. In the midst of feeling bad it is very easy to keep spiraling and reinforcing the bad feeling and accentuating it.
For me this has been one of the more difficult aspects, because I tend to want to really hold on to my feelings and stick with them. It can feel very important to keep feeling bad in response to something bad that happened! There’s several things that can help with this.
Ultimately what it comes down to is that it is just silly, as in not sensible, to feel bad. This is actually remarkably prosaic. There certainly exist genuinely bad situations and circumstances in life. Like you say, you may lose someone close to you, or someone close to you make get ill. It is an insult to intelligence to somehow try and trick yourself that it isn’t ‘really’ bad. And the other set of normal advice is to cope with it in various ways, accept that life sucks and then you die, and it’s a matter of making the best of it.
But instead of that it’s just a matter of seeing that – how you feel about it does not change the situation one bit. It does not cure someone’s illness to bemoan their fate. Spiraling into a depression does not bring someone back. And, in fact, it makes everything far worse – on top of the actually bad thing happening, your life is now ruined as well as the lives of the people around you. The show “Shrinking” detailed a fictionalized example of this, where the protagonist’s wife was a victim of a drunk driving incident. Her death causes him to completely disconnect from his life and be unable to take care of his teenage daughter, which makes the situation even worse for her as now she has effectively lost two parents instead of just one. And this example is particularly poignant because it shows that feeling bad about these things is ultimately self-centered. Feeling bad is not about the situation and it is not about whoever else is affected by it – it is about ‘you’. It is actually selfless to give up feeling bad and bemoaning one’s fate and instead do what is most sensible and beneficial for all (including yourself) in such a situation.
Of course, the idea is not to try to stop yourself from feeling however you do. If anything, it’s more the opposite – it’s about allowing yourself to feel, even though your self-image might dictate that you “shouldn’t” feel that way. This is particularly important when feeling things that aren’t socially acceptable. For example, getting extremely irritated at your partner or child or coworker for something petty. I am supposed to be a good person, I am not supposed to react in this way… but I do! But, accepting that I feel that way is the necessary first step, after which the rest can follow.
What it comes down to is that it’s essentially another skill, or conditioning, or way of approaching life, which is an ability to just set aside the issue and the topic and get back to feeling good first, for no other reason than that it’s silly to feel bad and doesn’t help with anything. Then, one you are back to feeling good, you can go ahead and investigate, dive in, deeply think about the situation and your relation to it, and change that part of yourself that was triggered such that the next time that same thing happens, you won’t react the same way again.
For mundane stuff this is typically sufficient. It may also be helpful to consider how children typically behave with regards to their emotions: they can get extremely upset and riled up about something, but they are also very quick to let it pass and drop it and get back to playing. There is no need to actually hold onto anything – it’s a very ‘adult’ thing to do in other words haha.
For genuinely bad situations like the ones mentioned earlier, you may wonder how is it possible to feel good even when such factually bad things are happening? What this comes down to is, as Richard put it, “Can I emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable?”[2] In other words, it is a remarkable ability to fully accept and understand that something factually bad has happened/is happening/will happen… and yet on an emotional level, accept it to the point where it doesn’t affect you on a visceral/emotional level anymore. This is the key thing: separating the intellectual understanding of a situation from the emotional reaction to it. This is incredibly refreshing and it is just amazing that it can happen, and it’s wonderfully freeing to be able to then consider the situation from this vantage point, where I find I’m able to make much better decisions about what to do practically.
I made this diagram some time ago that attempts to condense the above into a flow-chart (click to expand it):
A few highlights to help orient:
- The part that is properly called the “actualism method” is separated out in green – this is the actual enjoyment and appreciation part
- It thus distinguishes that all the rest are tools to facilitate the method rather than the method itself
- Note that the answer to “How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?” is always a feeling answer – I am either feeling felicitous (“feeling good”), neutral, bad, or feeling good feelings (a la love & compassion). This highlights that it is an affective monitoring that is warranted, not a cognitive one
- It highlights how investigation is best to be conducted whilst feeling good, which investigation is itself not the method per se
- It highlights how if feeling bad the key is to get back to feeling good, with the (meant to be temporary and short-lived) intermediate step of feeling neutral, first – from which point feeling good is much closer
- It provides an avenue to deal with the inevitable “getting stuck”
- And it provides a way out of all this endeavour if one just wants to give up (“Life sucks / it’s all stupid / woe is me”)
I will leave it here for now as I’m sure that is quite a lot to digest!
Cheers & all the best,
Claudiu