Things are moving rather fast for me that I wanted to quickly report before forgetting the details as I did in my last posts.
It is amazing how fast I can learn and adapt—be it actualism or anything—as long as I just embrace what I can my ‘high-context’ mind (I don’t mean ‘high-context’ culture here). So, it turns out I can hold a lot of different things at the same time. Like a lot. The downside is that it is difficult to communicate at the same velocity and scope, especially with neurotypicals. Language can only express so much. So it makes sense why I decided to discard the actualism ‘framework’ back in January and start from raw sincere awareness. I don’t read AFT anymore ‘out of habit’, but I do read it from time to time. I don’t practice the ‘actualism method’—and by that I mean, I don’t go “Okay, here are the steps; let me follow them one by one”. The framework doesn’t even exist even in this large high-context mind. But! It does come, in parts, in hindsight. Two things I found relevant time and time again: getting back to feeling good & investigating within ~30 mins. Actually, there’s a nuance to the first one (real-time is possible as long as __), but I’ll leave it for sake of brevity and also because I find writing more a chore nowadays.
I had also discarded the feeling nomenclature Richard came up with. So, the combination of this high-context mind + sincere awareness has been most fun and effective to tease out (in real-time, if not during that ~30 mins timeframe) what’s going in the psyche. I had also dropped feeling names & categories, and just went for raw experience.
I was under the erroneous impression that the many feelings a man has towards women revolve around sex, but this is not true. Sex is a pleasurable act of its own. By now, I’ve fully figured out how the whole psychic apparatus around sexuality works. The closest to what Richard describes here is ‘desire’ and ‘nurture’ (see my last post). Libido, btw, is just one aspect to ‘desire’, AFAIU. I’ve never set out to ‘nip libido in the bud’ (for instance); in fact, ‘nipping in the bud’ is something I never do. Instead, it is is more like pulling your off-track car back on highway. Not sure if I described it quite well; essentially what I always “did” (or “do”) was to get back to the actual moment as it happens (now), away from the inner feeling world (and the psychic timeline), if that makes sense. With women, I would readily find out if there’s mutual attraction, rather than imagining or hoping or intuiting for an outcome or stance. I discovered that, this way, I am spontaneously flirtatious even if I didn’t intend or want to (LOL). No games or facades. No holding back. That’s what ‘desire’ segues into, naturally — in the backdrop of the stable intent to be happy & harmless (to use Richard’s lingo) under the hood — so I just let it be. That stuff is fun … until it isn’t. This where ‘nurture’ comes into picture. I thought I had put those feelings to rest, but they kept popping up in different forms. Using sincere awareness (and without relying on Richard’s words), I teased out everything that was unfolding in the psyche …”all feelings as commensurate” (good/bad; covert/over) as Richard wrote in ASA article. But—and this is important—it did not happen in void; that teasing out only happened in the comparative context of wanting to be here … wanting for anything to happen now, rather than future. That’s what made it easier to give up on seductive feelings like hope or beauty, for instance. And it is so obviously true that, to not be emotionally dependent on the other person (such as for them to be able to manipulate you for instance) is salubrious for all the parties involved. In fact, I’ve found that the moment I ‘need’ her, she starts to lose interest. As for sex, even though I enjoy having sex with my partners, I don’t ‘look forward’ to it like I used to. I quite enjoy my own company, and there are so many other interesting things to do in life.
I can now see that ‘enjoy & appreciate’ makes sense. ‘Enjoy’ is something I would never use normally but that’s the word that would describe my experience. Appreciation is an interesting one, because it doesn’t operate consistently enough yet, but whenever it does it just magnifies everything. The other thing I’ll mention is that since January, I dropped both AF and PCEs as a ‘goal’. Basically I stopped caring about them. But I do now know that PCEs can more spontaneously happen going forward with less ‘self’-centric stuff going on. Whatever happens, it’ll be good - because it doesn’t matter in the end as the entire solar system will die out anyway LOL (seriously though: this perspective has always remained a critical element behind my practice).