Others ~ Selected Correspondence

‘Self’-awareness

While you mention difficulty differentiating between sensuousness and the affective feelings, I am not sure what the precise difficulty is. It might help if you could mention more about what is difficult.

Sure. I don’t think there is an inherent difficulty – only that it is easy to get sidetracked by using self-consciousness and emotional reasoning while doing the AF method. For example, noticing that I am feeling angry – I notice that – now sensuousness notices with attentiveness and total awareness – neither expressing nor repressing – but self-consciousness can swoop in and say – I shouldn’t feel angry about that – so ‘I’ get upset about being angry – so instead of feeling the ‘righteous indignation’ of a ‘normal’ person – ‘I’ sometimes get upset about ‘my’ lack of progress in the AF method – sometimes, ‘I’ am a hazard to ‘myself!’ Ha!

There is an important issue here that I would like to look at a little more closely. You used the example of noticing that you are feeling angry and stated that sensuousness would notice that with attentiveness and total awareness. But then you say that self-consciousness ‘swoops’ in and takes over with the ‘should’ statements and then being upset about being angry in the first place.

The point that I am a little hung-up on is where you say that you are exercising attentiveness and ‘total awareness’ and, further, neither expressing nor repressing. I am questioning in this case whether there is attentiveness and what you call ‘total awareness’ because I think if there were both attentiveness and total awareness, the instincts would not be swooping in and swamping your experience of the present moment. My own experience of attentiveness is that this sort of thing just does not happen, and if it does happen, it happens only very rarely. I think what does happen is that there is a failure of attentiveness on my part and then I find myself caught in instinctual behaviours because I had not been practicing the attentiveness and had not been aware of what was happening to me. It happens so quickly and, naturally, there is a neurological reason for that, explained in detail on the AF website.

So, on the one hand, I am questioning whether during these times when the instincts come swooping in there is a real attentiveness, because my own personal experience is I notice that when I am practicing an alert attentiveness I am quite alert to the feelings that arise, the thoughts that are going through my mind, and the way that these things impel action. I can nip these in the bud before they gather steam. However, if I am not practising attentiveness, or there is a lapse in attentiveness, things can happen so quickly that they have my head spinning.

The other thing connected with this that I want to mention is experience gained in being an Actualist. Once you have fleshed out an emotional issue for yourself, using again your example of the ‘should’ statements connected with feeling angry, and you have explored this issue in depth, investigating any hidden beliefs, assumptions, inherited or socially inculcated values, then that issue effectively looses it’s impact and fades into oblivion. It will not rear its head, unless or until it is thoroughly investigated. I mention this because the experience of having the instincts come swooping in is not simply a matter of failed attentiveness, although that can be a heavy contributor, but there is the very critical importance of having demolished the foundations of a particular emotional issue through the repeated use of the method. I have found that these key issues need to be addressed over and over again, that they simply do not fade away because the instinctual self is so deeply entrenched and embedded, and the behaviour patterns are so habitual.

It is quite satisfying to have the experience of changing by using the Actualism method.

Suddenly, quite out of the blue sometimes, I notice that situations that used to get my goat no longer have power over me and that I am free from the paralysing grip of anger, malice, worry, anxiety, etc. as well as the sweet, syrupy emotions of love, affection, nurturance, and the yearning for the same. There is a vast freedom that comes from having rolled one’s sleeves up and gotten down in the mud and grappled with one’s demons, so to speak. It has been my experience that the periods of freedom from instinctual patterns of behaviour become incrementally longer and longer and it is rare to have the sort of instinctual bleed-throughs that you speak of.

Of course, your experience may be a bit different from mine, and I would welcome any comments you have about this. Gary to No 37

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