Hi John,
Great to hear you’re interested in practically applying actualism!
This is a great question. This flow chart might help. It might seem a lot at first glance but just start at the top and follow from there: Actualism Diagrams Hub - #3 by claudiu (direct image link: here). It will tell you what to do at each step.
I remember Richard saying at some point that he tried a few times to make a “start to finish” guide to actualism, starting at ‘the’ definite starting point and going from there, but he never could do it.
The way I would put it is that actualism is all highly interconnected with itself, as is life in general, so it’s just a matter of starting where you are at.
What I’d give as very starting advice is this: just ‘wait’ until you find yourself in a normal, regular, run-of-the-mill ‘good mood’. As in, lead your life normally until you find yourself in a good mood. This happens to everyone at some point.
Now once you are in the good mood (as in basically feeling good), then feel out the mood. Feel out what it feels like to feel good. It feels nice, doesn’t it? Allow yourself to appreciate this and even maybe start to luxuriate in it a little. A good mood basically seems quite normal while you’re in it, and it’s easy to ‘overlook’ it. Easier when in a bad mood to feel bad and wish you were in a good mood. By actively appreciating the good mood you help to solidify it for you.
Then here is the key, is consciously initialize a general affective awareness of how you are feeling. When in a good mood it is as simple as actively feeling that you are in a good mood.
Inevitably (at first) you will find that the good mood has diminished. Now you aren’t feeling good anymore. Oh noes! Not to worry, this is all normal.
What you do now is trace back to when you last remember feeling good. The more active your affective awareness is, the shorter a time-span this will be. Then when you have that solidly in mind, go forward a little until you find you were not in a good mood anymore. Right around there is the trigger, it is what got you out of that feeling good mood.
Now you learned something about yourself – that trigger, that normal event that happened, takes you out of a good mood.
At this point you have something to investigate. The advice is to get back to feeling good first, and do the investigation while feeling good. The ultimate goal is to see that it is not worth letting that thing take away from enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive. But you have to actually see that. If you do think it’s worth it then you will let it take away from feeling good. But if you are able to give up whatever aspect of yourself it is that lets you do that, then when that trigger happens next time it won’t take away from feeling good anymore.
At the beginning stages it is essentially just about doing this, over and over, repeatedly, and as you do it you will more consistently be in a good mood. This is how you establish the baseline of a generally feeling good.
There is more to go from there but this is the first stages… I’d suggest that you read all the above, take it in, start trying it out, and if you like you can start a journal to detail how it’s going, giving opportunity to other actualists on the forum to chip in and share notes. Of course if you have specific questions about this or that then creating new topics in this category is the way to go.
Cheers and well wishes,
Claudiu