Hi @scout,
Nice to see you posting again!
The main thing I want to draw your attention to is the fact that ‘you’ are ‘your’ feelings and ‘your’ feelings are ‘you’.
In other words, emotions are not things that are separate from you, that happen to you, that you own or have, some sort of otherly force that you have no control or sway over. Emotions are nothing other than you yourself, the person that is reading these words right now!
This can be difficult to accept because there are a lot of rotten, dirty, hurt and hurting aspects of ‘me’ that it is tempting to want to avoid acknowledging. Morality, instilled via social conditioning, dictates that I must be a ‘good’ person, and a good person doesn’t even feel these bad things, therefore to maintain an illusion of being a good person, bad feelings have to be explained away somehow.
But the answer is to simply accept that yes, you are that way, those are an aspect of you, that is how you genuinely react to or feel about certain things.
So you will find that it doesn’t make sense to attempt to suppress ‘them’ or push ‘them’ away, or even to wrap yourself in them — but rather to acknowledge that when you are experiencing an emotion, you are experiencing nothing other than you, yourself!
This should answer your question of “why do they [emotions] come back?” – so long as ‘you’ exist, there will be emotions. There is simply no way around it. This is why the actualism method isn’t to not feel anything, but rather to feel felicitous – because you cannot simply stop feeling.
The only time there are no emotions will be in a PCE at which point the actual scout will be experiencing himself as an actual flesh and blood body, apperceptively, and perhaps wonder what all the fuss is about .
Well, the key is that you can’t really fool yourself. I mean, you can try, but ultimately you only fool yourself about fooling yourself.
The reason you experience an emotion is because your actual brain accurately takes in sensory inputs and generates an understanding (accurate or not) of something having happened. An emotion is then a reaction to this understanding. There is no way around it – an emotion doesn’t happen unless you are aware on some level that something happened, and it is specifically and precisely a reaction, a response to that understanding. You can’t fool yourself at the much higher-up ‘ego’ level that something didn’t happen, or that you didn’t really react to it that way – you did.
The way to feel felicitous instead of feeling a non-felicitous emotion, then, is to do a dive into yourself, often a deep-dive, to figure out, firstly, exactly what it is that happened in the world that triggered the emotion, and secondly, why it is that you felt that way about it.
The solution – where the solution is feeling felicitous instead of not-felicitous – is seeing that it is not worth feeling bad, wasting the only moment you have of being alive (i.e. this moment), as a response to that event that occurred. There is no way to short-circuit this, you have to actually see it.
The key is that you don’t have to fool yourself or pretend that what happened didn’t happen, or pretend that a bad thing that happened actually wasn’t bad. If you got viciously yelled at by a family member – that is genuinely a bad thing, nobody likes being yelled at and it’s being on the receiving end of malice and aggression. It’s silly to say it isn’t bad or even to get yourself to appreciate this bad thing somehow!
Rather it’s to see that, even though this bad thing happened… even so, it is not worth feeling bad about it! Why would it be? Feeling bad doesn’t change what happened and only prolongs your suffering. The key is to feel good, to feel felicitous, despite any such bad things… to be happy and harmless in the world as it is, with people as they are – which includes any such bad things! You don’t have to like them, but you will see that it is silly to feel bad about them and sensible to continue feeling good despite them.
Once you actually see this, then you will find that you are suddenly feeling felicitous instead. There is no choice at that point – the seeing of it is the resolution of it.
Conversely, if you are continuing to feel bad – you know that you have not seen it yet. This is a very simple guide to keeping yourself on track.
Of course it can take a long time and many attempts to figure these things out, particularly the things nearest and dearest to you… but it is well worth it
For more details on this, it may well be worth a re-read of the This Moment of Being Alive article.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Claudiu