It’s been quite a while since I had any insight into anything to do with actual freedom.
However, having read recently the thread where a respondent wrote about experiencing “I am my feelings and my feelings are me,” I began to contemplate what this meant.
There seems to be a continuous self. One which is independent of feelings.
I wondered how can it be true that I experience myself as continuous, while “I am my feelings and my feelings are me” being a fact.
My hypothesis is this; feelings have, as a property their nature, the quality we call ‘self’.
The crude metaphor that comes to mind is that of “petrol”. (Petroleum, gas, fuel).
Petrol does not burn because it has something other than it’s own nature at play. It is flammable. It is a hydrocarbon that will combust.
In this metaphor, feelings are the ‘self’. They feel like a self, because they have the property of being ‘self’.
Which implies that each feeling and mood, creates the experience of ‘self’. Further to that, as each feeling can be different (from happy, to sad, to angry et al), on a spectrum of various states, there are as many ‘selves’ as there are feelings.
The continuous experience of ‘self’ is in effect, a multitude of seemless ‘selves’, one after another.
What ties the experience together is beliefs, conditioning and other ‘thought’ based commonalities. One feels oneself to be existing as a self feeling feelings because of the ‘thought’ based commonalities imbibed within each ‘self’. They are, despite the experience, seperate ‘selves’.
This then makes it possible to choose.
One no longer is choosing to feel one way or another, but rather one is choosing which ‘self’ to manifest.
Herein lies the trick; for one to choose a self which manifests “feeling good” , naivete and all that is prescribed in the actualism method, one must first have such a ‘self’ available to choose from.
Constructing such a ‘self’ then, is first a matter of belief, conditioning and socialisation.
It’s quite apparent to me that the primary reason I couldn’t embark of a journey of feeling good all the time, no matter what, is that none of my ‘selves’ had any of the qualities required. None of the feeling states, with the shared conditioning and beliefs, came close to a ‘naivete’ featured ‘self’.
Having hypothesised this, the challenge is to believe and condition such a ‘self’.
An old Buddhist metaphor comes to mind “one builds a raft to cross over, but must also abandon it on the other side”.
The only problem with this will be that reducing naivete or felicity and innocuity down to beliefs and conditionings means that it will be a performance rather than the genuine thing.
You could instead do your best to locate naïveté or felicity and innocuity to whatever degree and then put a big red circle around them. Then it’s a case of doing what you can to remain there, to look at what knocks you off being there / things that can be done to get back there and what can be done to allow those ‘states of being’ to flourish.
This is somewhat were I find myself; I wake up and determine not to be harsh with myself. That is the primary goal of those few moments. The idea of creating a ‘self’ which is naivete and wonder is quite nice.
I do have a surrogate for this self. the self I am when I am talking in person with others.
This is a nice self. Very caring. Encouraging.
It’s possible that I can morph a naive and wonderous self from that.
First I want to re-iterate Vineeto’s excellent post that she linked to this question from:
The emphases she added are very relevant: actualism is about actually doing it, experiencing it, feeling it out, rather than thinking about it and constructing beliefs or worldviews about these things.
That being said, your thought process here is a bit confused, which is inevitable when it isn’t grounded in experiential probing but rather in intellectualizing.
You start with feelings, then hypothesize a ‘self’ arises out of the feelings because each feeling has a property called ‘self’, then that there are many selves because there are many feelings, then hypothesize the reason the self feels continuous is because of thoughts (i.e. beliefs & “other ‘thought’ based’ commonalities”), and then that you have to use thought to ‘construct’ a self in order to feel a certain way!
Note the inversion at the end there – you went from feelings being primary and creating a self, and then by adding thought as tying selves together you ended with thought being primary and creating a self and thus creating feelings!
This is of course about-face: feelings are indeed primary, and a Self remains even if the ego disappears, as Richard experientially reported during his enlightenment period.
And now after having concocted this new belief you’ve set yourself on a challenge to try and ‘construct’ a naive self! As to be naive is to be ingenuous, straightforward, artless, without guile, cunning, deceit, or trickery, and comes from being sincere, as in genuine, pure, whole, and without pretense, I can hardly think of a less effective way to become more naive!
Again it’s about-face here. You think that you have to use thoughts to create feelings, to concoct naive beliefs to force yourself into becoming a naive self. This will not work.
Look, every human is born the same way and as a result of genetic inheritance has the capacity to feel the full range of passions, feelings, calentures, and emotions, ranging from the good feelings of love and compassion, the bad feelings of aggression and fear, and the felicitous ones of joy and delight and generally having a good time. As the ego is constructed on top of the soul, which soul is these passions/feelings (as in the whirlpool analogy above), you do not have to ‘think’ or ‘believe’ anything to be able to experience these feelings. Your soul (which is who you are) already comes pre-equipped with this capability.
I would suggest that rather than hypothesize and try to have “insight about anything to do with actual freedom”, you follow the advice of people who have had success with the actualism method, try and do what they did, and if you fail and can’t figure out why it’s not working then you can try posting on the forum and explaining in detail what you did and what happened, and there are many forum members active now that would be able to offer assistance.
To feel good more consistently you don’t have to do anything other than experientially employ the actualism method. First get to a point of feeling good, regardless of how you do it. Then notice that it feels good to feel good – isn’t it better to feel good than to feel bad? This is experiential advice, not something for you to be reading now in a bad mood and nod your head and agree ‘of course’. It’s an advice to be done when you are actually feeling good – feel out the feeling good, doesn’t it feel nice? And then you can appreciate that you are feeling good and how much nicer it is than the feeling bad of a short while ago.
This way you will make it easier for you to naturally gravitate towards feeling good, as it feels so good to do it. It will give you motivation and incentive to notice as soon as possible when not feeling good, and then get back to feeling good soonest (see: This Moment Of Being Alive and flowchart: Actualism Diagrams Hub - #3 by claudiu)
In other words it is a skill issue and you will only get there by doing it, but luckily you can start at any time and progress at your own pace.
As for not being able to “embark” on this journey… if you have to take a long drive somewhere, do you bemoan how you can’t embark on the drive for various reasons? Or do you just get in the car and start driving? Once you make the decision to get into the car you’ve already embarked, and then it’s a step by step process of getting the keys, walking to the car, getting in, and starting to drive. The journey of “feeling good all the time” starts now, by deciding to do it, and then each time you feel good, that is a step on the journey, you are already doing it! Nothing is ultimately holding you back from doing this. There is no quality or aspect of you that makes it not possible for you to do this – every feeling-being is rotten to the core, including all the ones that successfully self-immolated. You are not especially set-up to forever fail, the universe is not set up that way, as evidenced by pure intent.
It’s a bit confusing if what you are trying to achieve here is creating a new holistic self / morphing the parts into a new single holistic self, or rather create a competing actualist self among the original multitude of selves, but since you are writing in plurals here goes my interpretation and 2 cents.
I’ve been playing with the selves from the Internal Family Systems and EMDR therapy perspectives these last few months, and my takeaway from that regarding your exploration here is that, rather than trying to construct a different self as a launchpad for actualism, focus on trying to integrate the selves that you think are obstructing your way to feeling good.
These approaches point to strategies your self (or split selves) have adopted to survive (likely derived from trauma), and the internal dynamics they create to further protect you. These approaches don’t quite dismantle the selves, but rather reassign and rearrange them and their entire structure in a way that is more harmonic and functional.
In my experience, looking and working on the selves from this framework can help in the more structural sense (the investigative actualist part of removing obstacles) rather than the core one of feeling happy and harmless.
For instance, they have removed nasty reflexes I used to have embedded in my mind/body that created extreme anxiety and tend to deviate me from any state of wellbeing, or they have helped me being a good friend to myself after I recognized the roles and strategies my selves were playing, to then appreciate the work they’ve done for me and make peace with them rather than continuing the indefinite internal wars.
Back to the point: it seems to me that you are trying to bring a new player to then play a competitive game. You want to create the optimal actualist player to outcompete the rest of the players.
And my point is: rather than bringing more players to the table, my suggestion here is that you focus on taking a look at the existing ones, understand them, appreciate them, make peace with them, and then make them play collaboratively towards your actualist goal.
This way, like we say in gaming, you make the whole game PVE (say, you vs. the human condition) rather than PVP (you vs. you) from the start.
Curious thing is that, after doing that realignment and integrative work to some extent, and removing those few obstacles to stabilize the launchpad so to speak, I’m realizing that my ultimate problem is actually pretty straightforward: I’m lazy or distracted, that’s it.
When I’m not going for it, just like Claudiu stated above, is either because I’m prioritizing or using my attention for other stuff (petty desires, body pains, diseases), or I can’t get past the initial friction that is going from feeling bad, neutral or whatever to the whole range of happy and harmless feelings, and do what’s necessary to sustain it over time. In other words, it ends up being about changing the good ol’ bad habits rather than devising sophisticated new versions of my self.