the bliss i have experienced in love is greater than any sober pleasure i’ve known and the validation was deeply reassuring. why does this matter?
i suffer. i would like to escape my suffering. the path of romantic love has provided temporary escape in the past and i have hypothesized that if i can find a lasting, mutually-interested mate, my suffering and insecurity will be alleviated.
i want it but i can only do so much to control whether i get it - this causes more suffering to escape from. if i find it i will know it is rare and that i am dependent upon it to suffer less - this will also create suffering, now tied to another.
unwinnable. i still feel the longing. i would love to taste mutual love for real, to know experientially that it is not what i am looking for. holding onto that desire keeps me locked into the very pain i crave love to escape from. i scrutinize and compare my appearance and behavior to try and gauge whether i am worthy of the love i want
i find this very tiring. it is probably within my power to let go. would i be missing out on something fundamental to the human experience? i want to live it and feel it and understand. it is the last experience i really want
Have you been in a romantic relationship where both of you loved each other? I ask because having ridden the love wave all the wave up and down, I can say that romantic love feelings are truly amazing, but they come with the brutal cost of dependency, jealously, insecurity and the like. For me personally, they rank below things I’ve experienced in EEs, a PCE, and various drug states. But then again, only after having tasted it can I tell you this. I’d say if your heart is set on it, you’re going to go in that direction anyway. So might as well commit. I know that I could not have gone in any direction other than love.
in all my romantic dynamics, the love has been somewhat one-sided - either i have been holding out, or my partner has. while i would like to scratch the curious itch of finding that mutual love, it is so very rare that i find someone who provokes those feelings in me that it kind of feels like i am deferring happiness until i win the lottery
your observations on insecurity, jealousy, etc. resonated with me. i have felt the feeling i am chasing towards one man before. he is with someone else now. there is a part of me that wants his freedom and happiness, but it is buried underneath a self-pitying, aching desire for him to love me back. the part that aches seems to be the very same part that experiences enthrallment with the romantic possession of another - this dejectedness is the ugly side of the infatuated thrill.
i am a little soured to that feeling in seeing that it doesn’t actually care about his well-being, it just wants him to play a desirable role in my story for my comfort and pleasure
I am sorry you are going through that. Lost love is so very painful: One of the worst things about being human - No doubt. Sorting through those feelings both rationally like you describe yourself doing and, more importantly, intuitively* will be fruitful. But be sure to find pure intent first** and hold onto it while doing the sorting. Otherwise, there is no third alternative to aim for. You will be merely trying for the 2nd best` of 3 options``. May I recommend pouring over the AFT’s numerous mentions of pure intent.
*feeling out the feelings and allowing yourself to feel better
**the essence of infinitude, benevolent and benign, external to oneself and able to be felt sensuously
`being free of those bad feelings/having good feelings in their stead
``3 - pure intent/EE’s, 2- good feelings, 1- bad feelings
thank you for your kind words. it feels intense but it’s just a silly mourning for something that never existed. it’s been painfully helpful pointer towards the very discomforts that led me to become enraptured with a fantasy
i’ll be honest - a lot of richard’s lingo only somewhat lands with me. i don’t think i have the clarity of connection to a PCE to have my intent be fully “pure”, i’m kind of muddling through. i experience the pendulum of emotions (intuitively as you said), good and bad, and i increasingly experientially see how they create each other. and am less inclined to chase many of the highs as time passes. but i still chase sometimes. i also don’t know if i fully know what an EE is, experientially. i have many more lovely moments now than i used to
i have had a lot coming up in response to having seen the man i was in love with this past friday, and i see i have been inclined to believe some of the narratives arising in this pain. it’s hard to stay lucid. awareness really does alleviate the hardest suffering but the habitual pull to soothing habits is strong, and the stories boil in the back of my brain while i try to numb. if effort is not made to become aware, this suffering pattern is the path of least resistance
I wonder if being’s intent can ever be pure. I doubt it. My guess is that the intent comes from one’s native intelligence or perhaps a part of “the essential character of the universe”. Read up on it and try to experience it yourself.
Yeah I think looking for ‘my’ pure intent is not the way to go. I was just thinking now of another way pure intent could be explained.
I thought of ‘me’ as the ‘being’ being able to dip ‘my’ (forever rotten) toes in the perpetually flowing river that is actuality. ‘I’ cannot own this cooling water flowing by and offering its blessings. It is not ‘me’ and it is not ‘mine’ and yet it has an effect on ‘me’, it offers a respite and changes ‘me’.
I like the latter two sentences. I don’t like the first image personally cause it makes it seem like ‘I’ and actuality can “touch”. It may be just word choice but I don’t like to describe it that way. There was a long thread about it here: Connection to pure intent without contact?
Maybe the best I can do is that pure intent is like a new way of being conscious starts to take hold, ‘I’ can be aware it’s happening but ‘I’ can’t feel it out, but ‘I’ can allow it to happen and be naive as a result and allow ‘myself’ to go further in the background eventually leading to an EE or a PCE.
Yeah agreed I guess that is the limits of trying to use a metaphor. Now come to think of it I actually prefer what @John wrote :
This different approach … felt like the opening of a window and now to have a fresh air flowing into the dark dungeon called me - here to mix with the stench of the rotten feelings that I’ve been breathing for so long
Still there is the issue of contact lol but I don’t think there is a way to get around that with a metaphor. At least air is less solid than water
This is probably more closely aligned with what actually happens, as in the experience of purity and the experience of ‘being’ are 2 different modes of consciousness. One is dirty and one is clean, they can never be aligned into 1 though.
However the experience of purity leaves a lasting impression which then continues working away at the identity in the long term and also provides relief to the ‘being’ in the short term by diminishing separation.
There is 1 affecting the other even though there is no contact.
Also to add: the “pure” in “pure intent” means the same thing as the “pure” in “pure consciousness experience” — ie, absent of self or Self or being. It refers to something outside of the human condition.
So indeed ‘me’ or ‘my’ intent or ‘being’, can never be pure — with the word used in the sense as it is in “pure intent” and “pure consciousness experience”.
One could say one’s intent is genuine or sincere — and indeed a synonym of these in general usage (ie not specific actualism terminology) would be “pure” — but that would just be conflating terms.
It’s possible to source / increase the connection to pure intent via sincerity
What do you sincerely want? Do you have a sincere connection to the aims of actualism? And from that sincerity clarity of purpose can come, the energy for whatever leg-work is necessary can come, and the connection to the purity comes.
i can’t let go of what i refuse to let myself see.
i can shame emotions time and time again as not sensible - why do they come back? on some level, which i will never see if i don’t allow the emotion to present itself and be known, i want it to come back. because part of it is immensely pleasurable, or reassuring; because it makes me feel safe or in control. like an addict i will cling to the pleasurable parts of emotions and drown out the unpleasant parts with other sources of pleasure (food, codependency, video games; each with their own respective downsides)
when i don’t hide the feeling away and i let myself know it and feel all parts of it, the wonderful and painful, and see the ancient wounded parts of me that wraps itself in these emotions like bandages, i can understand it and appreciate it without delusion. and without forcing, without suppression, without doing anything at all - i let it go. because only then it is utterly clear that doing so makes absolute sense
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
i think my desire to be free is in part selfish but not “Self”-ish, if that makes sense?
like the clearer i can see things the more i want more than anything for my body to be happy and healthy (but harmonious too, i don’t want to step on backs for my well-being, and the well-being of my body depends on the health of the whole system of humanity, i want it all to be well)
and then i see myself as the miserable little program running in the foreground of an otherwise lovely life (even when i am sick, i can see that peace is possible, and enjoyment too if the pain isn’t awful). i as a program demand resources that divert attention away from enjoying the peace and indulging in the healthy things a clear-eyed body enjoys. i push the body towards addictive behaviors to distract myself from my own self-created pain. i create very literal stress and inflammation in the body with my constant agitation; i actually make the body more vulnerable and prone to sickness
being this entity has always kind of sucked but carried its own addictive rewards. however being this entity feeling trapped in a body that i have sickened with my stress and poor behaviors, to the point where it struggles to work and participate in the world, is hell. what’s funny is that all along all the stress was just trying to keep the body safe; like a fucked-up parent (that’s probably where i learned a lot of this), i really was just trying to take care of myself the best i knew how. all that’s done though is exhaust and sicken my body, and make it scared of everything
i don’t think i’m helping. when i listen to what the body wants without imposing my ideas for what it should want, it takes care of itself, it asserts its boundaries to others, and it gets healthier. i’ve done this dance before though; if i rush in to claim this improvement and start using the body for my own agenda again i will just trash it and in a few years will probably be back here, bedridden and trying to undo the damage of my machinations.
so if “my” body is perfectly equipped to know what it needs and take care of it, what’s the point of me?
I’m not sure what you mean - do you capitalize “Self” to refer to a god? Or are you trying to highlight that your desire is not selfish in the traditional sense? Using air-quotes to indicate that it’s not identity driven.
If so, perhaps the word self-interest may be more suitable.
To be able to meet the challenges of life free of your self-imposed suffering is a really nice gift for yourself and a great gift for others - whether they can appreciate it or not. You’ll have to do mental gymnastics to qualify that as selfish - which admittedly, we’re quite good at.
strange and cool. there’s been this stillness right at the periphery of my waking perception, usually covered by the noise of the mind but lately i notice it more and more. the more the ongoing blabbing in my brain subsides (i still often forget and indulge it, but i am practicing not doing so), the more the stillness is apparent.
and it’s so nice. yesterday i was having an experience similar to what i’ve seen some people here describe. spending time with friends and strangers and just finding them totally fascinating and enjoyable. the normal layer of constant obsessive self-monitoring was gone, and i had no emotional ploys where i was trying to extract specific responses from them. i just found it genuinely fun and interesting and cool to be interacting with them - it was a delightful game and exploration. i’d had moments of operating like that on psychedelics before.
this came after a couple days that felt pretty fraught and agitated. i was having a really hard time getting back to feeling good; even grounding myself in my senses, which usually works, just highlighted the underlying agitation, and i found myself drawn to constant distractions.
eventually, i decided to approach the agitation with curiosity rather than try to move away from it. i found bundles of tension, resentment, and self-loathing. i didn’t entertain the narratives or indulge but i didn’t fight the feelings either and they moved through me powerfully. i saw how much of my life i’ve spent scared and sad and all the ways i’ve hurt myself over and over desperately seeking happiness and validation outside of myself. i saw how my loved ones also do this, and i could clearly see the pain we inflict upon each other from our respective wounded, seeking blindness. i cried for a while; it was the natural and innocent response to seeing the nature of this web of pain and dependence so clearly, and all the harm and waste that it causes.
afterwards, the agitation was gone. i’ve had cycles like this in the past too and i always resist and try to escape the agitation rather than investigating, because i am scared of the pain that will be revealed. but the tears weren’t actually scary or bad, and the clarity was remarkable, and the peace that follows when i am no longer trying to hide something from myself is better than any drug
been going deeper into this. recognizing how divorced my psyche and my body have been for my entire existence. what i am calling “selfishness” here is nothing but respecting and abiding by the genuine signals of the body, which i have historically overridden with the louder signals of fear and agitation from my psyche. fear of not keeping up, of not fitting in, of not meshing with other people and society
it’s a lesson in the most obvious thing in the world. of course my primary responsibility as an organism is to look after my own health and wellbeing, and everything else extends from that foundation. how fucking crazy that my brain was perverted into thinking that there was literally anything else more important.
i have stopped arguing with where my body is at right now (i have been diagnosed with long covid and a potential autoimmune condition but it’s still not concrete). i sleep 12-14 hours a day currently and am bedridden a lot of the time. often i don’t have the energy to exercise or socialize. all this is only a problem as long as i fight it. when i don’t engage in resenting my circumstances, i can just appreciate the rest. and heed however much of it my body demands. lying in bed is a great opportunity to notice resistance to circumstances and how it manifests as tension, and then see the tension relax.
without argument or tension, my sheets are soft and my house is cozy. i love the smell of winter air on my daily walks. i am happy that i saved enough money that i can truly not worry about anything but taking it easy for a while, while whatever this is hopefully stabilizes. but even as it is, right now, i still feel in touch with life being good, even more so than i’ve been in touch with it in previous chapters when my body was working better. stopping everything has honestly been a little bit of a blessing bc there’s not really much to do right now other than observe my own mind. i dont currently have the energy to chase many external threads in hopes of happiness. felt shitty for a while because i’m “not supposed to live this way” as a young person but fuck that, you get the circumstances you get and even if it’s not what i’d prefer if i had a choice it’s still pretty cool to be alive
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