Sonya: It’s wonderful how simple it is. I think where I was going wrong before was trying to figure out why I was feeling bad whenever I was feeling bad, and of course trying to do that whilst in that state means that any investigation led me to justifying and solidifying my “right” to feel bad.
So, being okay with not trying to intellectualise my feelings meant that I was freed to see that I am being the feeling and fully experience it without repressing or expressing – then any time it came up again I would refer back to the last time that bad feeling came up and see that there was no point to feeling that way, it didn’t help the situation, it wasn’t “protecting” me from anything. In fact being that way would just spoil whatever experience was going on. The next time the feeling came up it would get easier and easier to nip it in the bud and go back to enjoying and appreciating.
After the above happened it seems to be getting easier to come close to the direct experience again. I keep getting fleeting glimpses of being close to that direct experience which is cool! It’s like I’ve found a road leading straight to that direct experience that is so easy to get back on, it seems all I have to do is just angle myself towards enjoying/appreciating and I’m back on it again. I guess that’s why it’s called the wide and wondrous path. (link)
Hi Sonya,
You have mapped it all out and it’s great you found a way to go back to enjoying and appreciating more easily and it easy that way “to come close to the direct experience”.
There is one hitch though you need to take into account – when you had the direct experience you described ‘you’ were in abeyance. Hence ‘you’ cannot make it happen, ‘you’ can only give permission to get out of the way and allow it to happen.
• [Richard]: ‘Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity/ innocuity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all … and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life … the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away.
Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is … and one is the experiencing of what is happening.
But refrain from possessing it and making it your own … or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared. [emphasis added]. (page 287, ‘Richard’s Journal’, Second Edition; ©2004 The Actual Freedom Trust).
Cheers Vineeto