|
Vineeto’s Correspondence on the Actual Freedom List Correspondent No 33
Hi, You wrote in response to my post to No 16 – There is simply no shortcut to eliminating fear without eliminating the I am a beginner to actual freedom reading, understanding and trying; May I ask a question, which is basically a clarification: when you say ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as the feeler in heart, does not the ‘me’ as the feeler still reside in the head? Is not ‘me’ as a feeler is just a special conditioning (the eastern, the soul etc.) of the ego who gives more credence to the feelings in the heart than the thoughts in the head? My question is because as I can distinctly see an entity ‘I’, the ego in the head, fictitious or otherwise, I do not seen any distinct entity in the heart; the heart seems to be a place for feelings; and I see that a part of me, still the ego, trying to give exalted interpretations of this feeling (particularly a good feeling :) when felt without other thoughts. Gary has excellently described that the feeler is not ‘a special conditioning’ of the thinker, or ego, but that the feeler is one’s instinctual identity, or one’s true self or soul, made real by the feelings that arise from the instinctual passions which are operating independent from and mostly prior to the thinker or ego. It may be useful for clarification to study the page on animal instinctual passions in the library where it is clearly laid out that
On the same page you can also find a link to LeDoux’ website (http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux/) should you want to investigate further studies that LeDoux and others have conducted re animal instinctual reactions, particularly on fear. On a practical level, when you use the actualism method and begin to question and investigate what feelings are fuelling your own thoughts, beliefs, values and psittacisms then you can find out for yourself that it is affective feelings that more often than not are in control of what you think and do. By conducting an investigation into your own psyche in action you quickly discover that it is instinctually fuelled feelings that are preventing you from being happy and harmless and not thinking per se as Eastern religious belief would have it. Thinking when freed of ‘self’-centric passions allows a free benign intelligence to operate and this intelligence then allows you to come to your senses for the first time in your life.
By conducting an investigation into your own psyche in action you quickly discover that it is instinctually fuelled feelings that are preventing you from being happy and harmless and not thinking per se as Eastern religious belief would have it. Thinking when freed of ‘self’-centric passions allows a free benign intelligence to operate and this intelligence then allows you to come to your senses for the first time in your life. I am trying to understand the entities in my inner world (head, bodily feelings, ...); thoughts – I am able to see and understand what they are; actually not all of them – certain thoughts seem to be ‘fuelled’ by some other force, like sadness or happiness, which probably is called the ‘feeling’; something happens to the body as one feels a feeling – but it seems to me that there is an entity in the head which says ‘I am happy’ and it also has reasons ‘because ..; I don’t like this because’; probably I haven’t traced the feelings to the source. Peter wrote an excellent piece about feelings and sensations in the glossary –
I would like to clearly understand what I am made of, so that I would not be lost in confusion... What every human being is currently ‘made of’ is that set of beliefs, conditionings and instincts that forms the habitual and neuro-biological program by which human beings currently operate and have done so, with few significant changes, ever since the first recorded civilizations. It is one thing to know about the human condition in theory but the real challenge – and satisfaction – lies in discovering the facts of how this common-to-all program functions in oneself. In order to explore this human programming in yourself you ask yourself the question ‘How am I experiencing this moment of being alive?’ and pursue whatever emotion and feeling you find preventing you from being happy and harmless in this moment. Any feeling or emotion such as anger, frustration or boredom that is preventing my happiness now, becomes of vital interest and can be traced back to its cause – the exact incident, thought, expectation or disappointment. At the root of this emotion or feeling one inevitably finds a belief or an instinct. I have found it useful and vital to first investigate all my beliefs and social conditioning that caused feelings such as anger, sadness, jealousy, depression, inferiority, loneliness, fear, doubt and the general resentment of being here. In the process of finding out what is preventing me from being happy and harmless I was not content with the first answer that popped into my head similar to the one that you describe as ‘I don’t like this because’ but I would then investigate the ‘because’ until I was satisfied that I had found the root cause, the thing that makes me tick. In finding the root cause I then had found a piece of my ‘self’ in action, identified a bit of ‘me’ as I was following and acting out my dearly held beliefs, my valued morals, my treasured individuality and, underpinning it all, my animal instinctual passions. Each time one recognizes one’s ‘self’ in action there is an opportunity to stop being malicious and sorrowful in this moment ... and change, irrevocably.
You wrote asking for clarification of a quote you found on the web –
If Vineeto is reading this correspondence, and if she can clarify this point, that will be good – somehow I think this seems to be the statement of my problem. Yes, I am reading with interest every post that is coming in. I can understand your confusion when I remember how I used to respond to overwhelming feelings – usually a lot of frantic thoughts arose as I tried to get rid of the unpleasant feelings. You describe it well in your letter to Gary –
The thoughts ‘with a quality of unpleasantness’ are in fact feelings or emotion-backed thoughts. When an unpleasant emotional reaction occurs, for instance a reaction to something someone said to you, then the automatic response is to try and ‘make the unpleasant feeling go away’, and this effort is often accompanied by frantic thinking. This thought-response is secondary to the affective feeling response which happens first. This fact can be observed by becoming aware of one’s own responses as they happen and they are best observed in reactions such as anger or fear where the automatic response is clearly felt as a strong bodily response in the heart, or in a sexual reaction where the automatic response is felt in the groin, or in grief or sorrow where the reaction is felt in the heart or gut. In order to become aware of a feeling when it is occurring, the first thing one has to do is to stop trying to make it go away as we have been socially or spiritually conditioned to do. As long as you object to having the feeling you cannot observe it. This means one needs to become aware of and understand one’s automatic reaction of suppression – and/or dis-association – in order to be able to experience the feeling fully so that you can then feel what the feeling feels like and give it a name. As a general rule of thumb it is impossible to examine a feeling while you are having it because, as you will have noticed, invidious and euphoric feelings, emotions and passions prevent clear thinking from happening – so the next thing to do is to get back to feeling good by recognizing that it is silly to waste this moment of being alive by being angry, irritated, fearful, sad, etc. When you are back to feeling good you can then begin to examine what made you angry, anxious, gloomy, etc. in the first place – when did the feeling first start, what was the event or situation that caused my affective reaction, why did I feel insulted, sad, angry, worried, etc., which of my cherished beliefs was being questioned, what part of my identity was being attacked, was there a fear underneath the initial feeling, what was this fear about ...? In this way you are conducting a scientific inquiry into your own affective experience, you are in fact examining your own psyche in action – but at first you have to allow the feeling to come to the surface so that you can conduct an extensive examination into all its aspects. Once you get over the initial moral and ethical objection to having unpleasant or undesirable feelings in the first place, you will notice a keen interest and fascination developing that comes from being able to be aware of your own feelings and emotions while they are happening and from being able to investigate them as soon as you are back to feeling good. This investigation into your feelings has to be experiential if it is to bring any tangible results – thinking about feelings and emotions abstracted from practical down-to-earth personal experience will not enable you to penetrate into the very nature of your psyche. So the first thing is to stop one’s usual habits of fighting, denying or expressing one’s feelings, blaming people and events for causing one’s feelings or dissociating from one’s feelings. By doing so you allow yourself to experience feelings all the while making sure that you keep your mouth shut and your hands in your pocket, otherwise you might do or say something you regret later on. Thus far there have only been two alternatives to coping with the feelings and emotions that arise from one’s instinctual passions. The first is suppression and the fact that we still need police and armies, laws and judges, moral codes and ethical values, attests to the failure of suppressing emotions. The other alternative is expressing your feelings and emotions, something which is fashionable in some spiritual and therapy philosophies. Expressed sorrow is not only socially acceptable, it is an encouraged activity in that it is imagined to bring ‘closure’ and resolution and it’s generally believed that if you haven’t got something to complain and bitch about then something must be wrong. Humans generally delight in expressing sadness, in being sad, feeling the bitter sweetness of sorrow, watching sad love stories, listening to sad music, etc. On the other hand expressed malice can easily lead to physical violence so humans have created socially acceptable outlets for malice such as sport, gossip, games, films, competitive business, and so on. Rather than having a problem with being malicious and sorrowful most people find meaning, delight and entertainment from feeling the feelings of malice and sorrow, which is one of the major reasons that actualism will be unpopular for a long time yet. Actualism is not about expressing or suppressing one’s feelings but about experientially examining them in order to get back to being happy and harmless as soon as possible.
Vineeto, a quick question: You said:
What is ‘affective’? Is feeling a ‘thought’ (emotionally backed)? Can you elaborate little further? Affective according to Oxford Dictionary is ‘Of or pertaining to the affections; emotional’ and Peter explained it further in the glossary – The three ways a person can experience the world are: cerebral (thoughts); 2: sensate (senses); 3. affective (feelings). The action of FEEL 2 Physical sensibility other than sight, hearing, taste, or smell; the sense of touch. b (A) physical sensation; a perception due to this. 3 The condition of being emotionally affected or committed; an emotion (of fear, hope, etc.). b In pl. Emotions, susceptibilities, sympathies. 4 Consciousness; an emotional appreciation or sense (of a condition etc.). 5 A belief not based solely on reason; an attitude, a sentiment. 6 Capacity or readiness to feel (esp. sympathy or empathy); sensibility. 7 Knowledge of something through experience of its effects. 8 The quality felt to belong to a thing; the general emotional effect produced (esp. by a work of art) on a spectator or hearer. Oxford Dictionary As can be seen from the dictionary definition, the word feeling is generally used for two very different meanings – most generally it is used to describe an affective feeling (def. 3-8), which includes both a pleasant and an unpleasant emotion, whilst its less common use (def. 1,2) is to describe a physical sensation, the sense of touch that detects hardness, softness, temperature, wind on the skin, weight, etc. Given the unique human ability to think and reflect affective feelings are very often expressed as thoughts and when one begins to become aware of the human condition in oneself, one notices that most of one’s thoughts are emotions-backed, i.e. most thoughts have an emotion as their basis instead of common sense or intelligent reasoning. The common wisdom in the East makes no distinction between thoughts and feelings and hence the practice of ‘right’ thinking can be literally translated into ‘right’ feeling – feelings such as feeling aloof, feeling morally superior, feeling pity for others, feeling dissociated from the world, feeling God-intoxicated, feeling Divine Love or feeling Divine. To encourage these feelings to run amok in the name of ‘right’ thinking leads only to full-blown narcissism and delusion. Contrary to popular Eastern-religion-inspired belief, thinking is not the problem, au contraire, when freed of emotion, passion and calenture it can lead to the emergence of a benign intelligence and common sense. Gary has already written about this to you from his experience with Krishnamurtiism. With increasing awareness one is becoming able to distinguish one’s feelings, label
them as feelings – even when they express themselves as thoughts – and examine them. When one becomes aware of the affective
component of thoughts one is beginning to free one’s thoughts from their emotional-instinctual limitations and ‘one’s native intelligence can emerge into full view of its own accord. Intelligence will no longer be
crippled’. Richard is currently having some interesting
Banishing the personal pronoun (I, me) from one’s internal language (thinking?) seems to immolate the self ... does it make sense to anybody? No. Contrary to popular opinion, controlled thinking does not alter anything in your feelings and emotions, it only pushes one’s ‘self’-centred feelings and thoughts further under the carpet, so to speak, and thus it becomes more difficult to observe and investigate the ‘self’ in action. The ‘self’ can be likened to the little controlling man in the head and the little passionately driven man in the heart, and can only be tackled successfully by bringing them out into the open, into the bright light of awareness, for observation, examination and investigation so as to discover exactly how ‘I’ and ‘me’ operate and prevent the possibility of anything remotely resembling clear thinking from happening. ‘Banishing the personal pronoun (I, me) from one’s internal language (thinking?)’ is comparable to re - arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, whereas by applying the method of actualism one does exactly the opposite – I acknowledge that all my feelings, emotions and emotion-backed thoughts (i.e. beliefs) are ‘me’, the ‘self’, the alien entity inhabiting this flesh and blood body. Thus I am un-doing the spiritual training of dis-identifying from unwanted feelings and emotions as in ‘I am not the body, I am not the self, I am not the bad emotions’, etc. By acknowledging that every feeling is ‘me’ in action I am then able to identify, label and observe each feeling, investigate its cause, its trigger and its source and once an affective feeling is understood experientially in its totality, it will disappear. In this way you nibble away at the ‘self’ bit by bit, affective feeling by affective feeling, self-centred thought by self-centred thought until ‘I’ and ‘me’ become so thin and transparent as to hardly interfere with the pure delight of being here.
Banishing the personal pronoun (I, me) from one’s internal language (thinking?) seems to immolate the self ... does it make sense to anybody? No. Contrary to popular opinion, controlled thinking does not alter anything in your feelings and emotions, it only pushes one’s ‘self’-centred feelings and thoughts further under the carpet, so to speak, and thus it becomes more difficult to observe and investigate the ‘self’ in action. The ‘self’ can be likened to the little controlling man in the head and the little passionately driven man in the heart, and can only be tackled successfully by bringing them out into the open, into the bright light of awareness, for observation, examination and investigation so as to discover exactly how ‘I’ and ‘me’ operate and prevent the possibility of anything remotely resembling clear thinking from happening. ‘Banishing the personal pronoun (I, me) from one’s internal language (thinking?)’ is comparable to re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, whereas by applying the method of actualism one does exactly the opposite – I acknowledge that all my feelings, emotions and emotion-backed thoughts (i.e. beliefs) are ‘me’, the ‘self’, the alien entity inhabiting this flesh and blood body. Thus I am un-doing the spiritual training of dis-identifying from unwanted feelings and emotions as in ‘I am not the body, I am not the self, I am not the bad emotions’, etc. By acknowledging that every feeling is ‘me’ in action I am then able to identify, label and observe each feeling, investigate its cause, its trigger and its source and once an affective feeling is understood experientially in its totality, it will disappear. In this way you nibble away at the ‘self’ bit by bit, affective feeling by affective feeling, self-centred thought by self-centred thought until ‘I’ and ‘me’ become so thin and transparent as to hardly interfere with the pure delight of being here. Thanks Vineeto... I realized that my ‘banishing’ the ‘I, me’ was no good soon after I sent the mail ... and what you wrote (below) seems to explain it well... Good. Can you remember what it was that made you realize that ‘banishing the ‘I, me’ was no good’? What was it that made you realize that ‘banishing the personal pronoun (I, me) from one’s internal language (thinking?)’ did not ‘seem to immolate the self’? I am asking because in this realisation you might find a vital clue to understanding that the method of actualism is 180 degrees opposite to traditional spiritual methods. Okay ... is there any short-cut here? Instead of going through each one of them and labelling (– greedy me)? In my experience with using spiritual methodology for 17 years and using the method of actualism for the past four years, I can verify that actualism is the short-cut. My life has already become unrecognisably better than it was four years ago – I am living in perfect peace and harmony with a man and I am happy and harmless 99% of the time. And why would I not choose to be happy and harmless? Why would I not do whatever it takes to experience this freedom from malice and sorrow, twenty-four hours a day? By always making a deliberate choice to be both happy and harmless in this moment, I am instantly improving my life. And the action of examining, investigating and understanding whatever prevents me from being happy and harmless in this moment incrementally deletes the social and instinctual programming of malice and sorrow in me, until, one day, as a consequence of this stubborn effort, the whole entity will collapse like a house of cards. This kind of inquisitive investigation is exactly the opposite to the traditional method of Vipassana, whereby one is simply advised ‘going through ... and labelling’ and then dismissing one’s unwanted feelings in order to get on with the business of being somewhere else but here. Maybe there is a misunderstanding as for how to apply the method of actualism. In the
library there is a section with related correspondence on It is not enough to simply label an affective feeling when it occurs for at this very point the fun of your investigation begins. Whenever I noticed a feeling of greed, as in your example, I explored and uncovered while experiencing the feeling what exactly I was feeling – what was I missing, why did I feel I needed this object or person, what were my moral and ethical judgements about feeling greedy, what lay behind my impatience and urge, what would have happened if I didn’t get what I felt I needed, what other feelings were connected with feeling greedy, for instance loneliness, anger, competition, resentment, inadequacy, survival fear, lethargy, wanting something for free, etc.? In short, I conducted an extensive exploration so as to map the territory of that feeling as exactly as possible and I used each opportunity of an occurring feeling in order to find out as much as possible about ‘who’ I am and what passions I am driven by. Once you get the hang off it, it’s great fun. Okay ... is there any short-cut here? Instead of going through each one of them and labelling (– greedy me)? Something like J. Krishnamurti stuff (sorry!) by realizing that the whole thing of ‘ME’ has come about because of a misunderstanding that ‘observer’ is different from the ‘observed’? No need to apologize, questions are the very stuff of investigation and discovery. Jiddu Krishnamurti never realized ‘the whole thing of ‘ME’ – like all other Eastern teachers he only taught that thought is responsible for human suffering and he made no mention of the instinctual passions being the root cause of all the mayhem and misery of humankind. As for his method of realizing the ‘misunderstanding that ‘observer’ is different from the ‘observed’, as you put it – according to his own words none of his non-disciples and non-followers has ‘got it’. If you think his method was a short-cut, it lead no-where because it did not work. He stated at the end of his life –
The longer I practiced the method of actualism – a wordless investigation as to how am I experiencing this moment of being alive and an examination of whatever it is that is keeping me from being happy and harmless in this very moment – the more I came to understand that actualism is actively changing one’s programming in the brain by examining and successively eradicating the roots of malice and sorrow deep in my own psyche. Actualism aims at eliminating the very cause of one’s unhappiness, fear, greed and aggression. It is essential to experientially understand the grip that your moral and ethical values, your spiritual conditioning and, last but not least, your instinctual passions have on ‘who’ you experience yourself to be – your thinking, your feeling, your behaviour and your actions. ‘I’ and ‘me’ pervade every cell of this body, ‘I’ and ‘me’ control the functioning of its chemical-hormonal balance or imbalance, ‘I’ and ‘me’ are running the full show. By applying the method of actualism one begins to insert increasing amounts of attentiveness, ‘self’-awareness and intelligence into the automatic instinctual and moral-ethical-spiritual programming and this process then evinces an actual and irrevocable change in one’s everyday life – one becomes ever more happy and harmless, no matter what the circumstances. Knowing that at the end all has to go, is there a method different from the step by step approach, or this is the only way? I found that first I had to get acquainted with ‘all’ that ‘has to go’ . The way I did that was that I investigated every affective feeling and emotion as they occurred. Thus I became acquainted with ‘me’ in action. First, I examined my morals and ethics as to whether they were silly or sensible and they stopped having a grip on me. When I was getting acquainted with my spiritual conditioning it became obvious how silly it was and it eventually became impossible to hold on to it. Similarly, as I was able to come face to face with my raw instinctual passions they are now wearing thin and becoming increasingly rare. Personally, I only know the ‘step by step approach’ and I like its incremental and certain success in improving my life way beyond my wildest dreams. I can appreciate its success particularly after 17 years of applying the spiritual method of mindless doing nothing, which brought no improvement in becoming either happy or harmless. You can get it if you really want it ...
It appears you had quite some thought about actualism and actual freedom. Personally I found it well worth the effort of deeply and comprehensively understanding something so radically new to human experience. Dear actualists: I have tried to summarise what I have so far understood from the Actualfreedom website and through interaction with you.
Please correct/comment if appropriate... I will keep to the same style and add a few points to your summary –
I have been thoroughly enjoying and what more, benefiting by all the recent discussions in the list. Thanks to No 38 and No 37. And as always, to Richard, Vineeto, Gary and Peter. I wanted to add my observation. There is a clear dichotomy as to what is actual and what is not in the actualist’s writings (Richard, Vineeto, Peter). And they have no use for what is not actual, which is only there to be exposed. And what is actual is arrived through PCE, not logical reasoning, though the latter is an aid. Is this correct? I noted this particularly in the dialogue between No 37 and Richard where No 37 tries to bring out the good aspects of imagination, whereas Richard has no use for it, as he is with the actual, which is more delightful and malice-sorrow free. More than logically seeing why ‘not actual’ is not so good (though seeing logically can be useful), it seems to be important to see that the ‘actual’ is beyond comparison with the other. Yes, and the only way to understand what is actual beyond doubt is to remember one of your pure consciousness experiences, which everybody has had at some time in their lives. It could even be a memory of childhood when one experiences the world, very often nature, as magical, sparkling, vibrant, abundant and pristine. I remember when I was about 8 years old and strolling through the meadow behind my parent’s house. It was summertime and the grass was about chest-height for an eight-year-old, the summer flowers were in full bloom and the grass itself was blooming. I lay down and completely disappeared in the high grass and all I could see were the tips of the swaying grass and the clouds drifting by in the sky. Everything was perfect, there were no worries in the world and I was engulfed by the magic of the meadow and the sky. Later on I tried to have this same experience again, by simply lying down in the grass and I thought that I couldn’t have the same experience because the grass wasn’t the right height. No matter what time of the year I tried, I didn’t manage to repeat the same innocent, carefree and delightful experience that I had on that particular day. Only when I learnt about actual freedom and understood the difference between a pure consciousness experience, normal every-day experience and a spiritual experience, did I understand that on this particular day I had a glimpse of the perfection and purity of the actual world. There are a few simple guidelines to recognize a PCE when you remember one. In a pure
consciousness experience, your senses are heightened and you experience peace and wellbeing that comes from the absence of
‘me’, worrying about ‘my’ survival. There might also be a sense of déja-vu as you realize that ‘I have always been here
as this flesh-and-blood body’ and everything in this actual world has always been perfect, is perfect now and always will be
perfect. The critical difference to any spiritual experience of altered states is that in a PCE there is a complete absence of any
feelings of awe, gratitude, beauty, love or grandeur. For reference you can check out Once you have experienced the absence of your ‘self’ in a pure consciousness experience you know beyond doubt that ‘the ‘actual’ is beyond comparison with the other’.
What follows is a ramble. Would be delighted if you respond, of course. Emotion backed thoughts. Feelings. Emotions. Instincts. Instinctual passions. Thoughts. Beliefs. Thinker and Feeler and Social Identity and Instinctual Self. Apperception. Are all these things demonstrably distinct? Given that The more you become aware of your feelings as they are occurring and your underlying identity, the weaker your identity becomes, which in turn frees your awareness for sensuous perception that was previously stifled. At some point there is so much awareness freed of its normal ‘self’-centredness that you are able to be both aware of everything that is happening and of this awareness in operation as well – and to be aware of being aware is apperception and apperception is what happens in a pure consciousness experience. A PCE occurs when, for whatever reason, a ‘self’-less awareness is operating and awareness that is freed of the burden of ‘me’ becomes aware of itself. This is sometimes actuated either through a physically dangerous event like an accident, through a sudden shock, through drug use or an unusual relaxing experience like a nature experience. The actualism method – continuous and extensive attention, observation and questioning of ‘who’ you feel and think you are – is designed to increase awareness and facilitate apperception not only as a one-off event but as a more and more inevitable outcome of increased attentiveness. The body of observations and conclusions presented in the website is ‘actualism’ to me. To the actualists this is ‘actuality’ and for somebody who is trying to understand, is it not a theory till (s)he verifies it for (him/her)self? And won’t it take time to verify it? In that duration, is it not a theory for them? Apparently there seems to be some difficulty for those who are not ‘actualists’ to see the ‘actuality’, and it takes time and practice, even if there is willingness. Also there is this confusion that springs from oneself in these matters. Surely you will agree that all this doesn’t seem to be obvious without carefully going through, discussion, reflecting etc. to a lot of people. So it could take a long time before the premises are seen for their factual status, and the method verified for its effectiveness, and till then ‘actualism’ is a theory one is willing to explore...? The moment you are willing to explore, i.e. to apply the method of actualism to become happy and harmless, you immediately change from a theorist with an intellectual understanding into a pragmatist who is then road-testing the method on his own psyche in action. And then you can verify for yourself that the method is indeed successful to make you more happy and more harmless. What usually ‘takes time’ is for people to begin to practice the method – and most never do – but once you begin to become aware of what you feel and think and systematically question the tried and failed, i.e. your beliefs and ‘truths’, then it becomes a lot easier to grasp ‘the actuality’.
1. In dismantling the ‘feeler’, I found that ‘Feeling is not a fact’ to be useful; i.e. when the feeling is rampant, to realize that ‘what one feels to be true’ requires the ‘feeling’ to be true – i.e. when I question – ‘will what is felt be true if the feeling were not there to support it?’ Yes, a feeling is not a fact, but feelings are experienced to be very real, and that sometimes includes heart palpitations, sweaty palms, a change in the tone of your voice, a dry throat, a tightening in the stomach, etc. – in short, you can be palpably aware of a feeling when it is happening. In spiritualism one is taught to become aware of one’s thoughts and feelings in order to dissociate from one’s unwanted feelings or thoughts and associate only with the desirable feelings and thoughts. The point in actualism, however, is to become aware of your feelings and thoughts in order to investigate their source. When this aim is clear, then the acknowledgment that ‘feeling is not a fact’ gives you the key to label and investigate your feeling, trace it back to what triggered it, what maintains it and what was the underlying reason that caused it to arise in the first place – you examine the beliefs, morals and ethics connected to your feeling until you arrive at the part of your identity that is creating and maintaining the particular feeling in question. If ‘what is felt be true’, be it a belief, moral, ethic, or psittacism, is not examined and replaced by fact and common sense and if the particular feeling itself is not investigated and traced to its source, the same-same feeling will arise again and again in similar situations because the identity of the ‘feeler’ itself has not been dismantled and thus remains unchanged. I found this working for me rather than going through the whole structure of what caused this feeling etc. as it seems to become circular in my case. When feelings seem ‘to become circular’ I found it helpful to find out the reason why particular feelings were so ‘sticky’, why it was important for me to feel this way, why I was afraid to question the particular part of my identity that was related to these feelings. For instance, at the time when I was busy with my feelings of ‘intuition’, I was at first very irritable whenever the subject came up in a discussion with Peter. Rather than being interested in questioning the veracity and sensibility of my intuition, I was busy defending my belief that intuition was an essential part of my survival and wellbeing. It took a couple of weeks until I grew weary of my irrational behaviour and then I started to look into why I was so desperately defending something that was obviously a passionate belief. I began to understand that my very resistance to search for verifiable facts gave evidence to the passionate nature of my belief in intuition. Once I had understood this much about the matter, I gave myself a kick in the bum and began to inquire into the issue with renewed intent. 2. The thoughts and feelings seem the substances of the inner world; the ‘thinker’ and ‘feeler’ seem to be inferred and an underlying property of the thoughts and feelings (not of all thoughts and feelings). 3. The thinker manifests himself as thoughts; and the feeler as ‘emotion backed thoughts’ and feelings. Yes, with one exception and that is that the human brain is capable of ‘self’-less thought, as can briefly be experienced in a pure consciousness experience. In a PCE, the clear thinking process that epitomizes apperceptive thinking has no ‘underlying property’ of either an ‘I’ nor a ‘me’, neither ‘the thinker’ nor ‘the feeler’. Richard says about apperceptive thought –
Have you ever contemplated about the wondrous activity of your heart beating, your eyes seeing? Have you ever reflected upon the magic of the millions of chemical processes that contribute to you being alive this moment? Have you ever observed and thought about the amazing abundance of life forms that have taken billions of years to develop on this planet and have culminated in human beings, who are not only capable of thinking and contemplating but are also able to be aware of the very act of being conscious? This fascination with the wonder of it all can develop into amazement, which, combined with reflection and contemplation, can produce apperceptive awareness, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. In such a moment of apperceptive awareness you can experience for yourself that ‘I’, the thinker, together with ‘me’, the feeler, cease to be and thinking takes place of its own accord.
In dismantling the ‘feeler’, I found that ‘Feeling is not a fact’ to be useful; i.e. when the feeling is rampant, to realize that ‘what one feels to be true’ requires the ‘feeling’ to be true – i.e. when I question – ‘will what is felt be true if the feeling were not there to support it?’ I found this working for me rather than going through the whole structure of what caused this feeling etc. as it seems to become circular in my case. When feelings seem ‘to become circular’ I found it helpful to find out the reason why particular feelings were so ‘sticky’, why it was important for me to feel this way, why I was afraid to question the particular part of my identity that was related to these feelings. By circular I meant that the links I follow in tracing the root of the feeling become circular – I am afraid because I can’t perform well and I can’t perform well because I’m afraid; what would you do in such a case? Maybe from what you are saying, I should ask ‘why is it important for me to perform well’... because I want to be better than others... or I want the applause... why? Because it feels good... and then…? Some insights into this kinds of investigation will be very valuable. (I request others who are running the investigation to share their results too – I would do it eventually). When I apply the method of actualism I do so because I want to become happy and harmless – that is my first and only priority. Then the investigation into how I am experiencing this moment of being alive has a clear direction – what worry, feeling, desire, belief, etc. preventing me from being happy and harmless and if so, why do I hold on to it? Actualists have written a great deal about how to apply the actualism method and have
shared their experiences as to how to make investigations into beliefs and feelings. You will find it under the links to selected
correspondences on the library page of Lately, I am getting a hang of the method and usually I find that there is some emotional memory/event in the past etc. hidden behind such feelings and once exposed (which is not at all obvious in the beginning – or should I say it is obvious but I would not see…???) the hold is either totally gone or weakened... but lot of work still remains. But as is pointed out in various actualism materials, it is very enjoyable as one gets freer and freer incrementally. Yes, the test is always if the hold that feelings have on you in a particular situation is weakened or if the feelings return exactly the same way at the next similar occasion. If they do, you simply root around a bit more and probe a little deeper each time. In psycho-therapy there is often great emphasis placed on remembering past harms and hurts, yet there is never a resolution of the associated feelings of sorrow and malice. Psychotherapy encourages you to remember childhood events in order to ‘heal’ the ‘wounded child’ but this only serves to enhance the social identity that is in part made of those memories. Whereas in actualism it is only necessary to go back to the event that triggered your current feeling in order to build up an experiential understanding of how your social and instinctual identity is programmed to work. Eventually past memories are not needed at all in order to recognize one’s identity in action – with sufficient practice you become aware of ‘me’ in action on the spot and nip it in the bud before feelings go rampant. I should also mention that so much material is present in the website and these days I am reading non-meditatively with eyes open and it is delightful :) – and I find that it is becoming more and more clear what is being said, why I resist it so much etc. I am delighted you understood the pun. Couple of other things: 1. How am I experiencing this moment of being alive – I realize the importance of this question (which effectively focuses one’s attention to the present) and probably carefully designed by Richard to deliver the goods – namely to start the inquiry into the feelings as they are happening. I was wondering about the usefulness of ‘of being alive’ part – isn’t it implicit? In the beginning I found ‘of being alive’ particularly useful given that spiritual practice focuses so much on how not to be here on this planet – typified by such sayings as ‘going inside’ or ‘finding an inner peace’ – and is only concerned with increasing your moral bank balance for life after death. However, once I had understood the gist of the actualism method of investigating what is going on each moment again, the question became a wordless attentiveness to being alive now. Physical sensations, thoughtful reflections and affective feelings are equally noticed. The increased awareness of being alive makes the sensual experiencing more delightful, contemplations more effective and enjoyable and it allows me to detect affective feelings as they begin to arise before they fester into raging emotions. I should say that sounds incomplete if you clip the tail, but it makes it shorter and therefore a little easier to apply in this phase of verbal questioning – particularly when feelings are rampant. Whenever feelings were ‘rampant’ I was busy investigating the feelings rather than repeating the initial question because I already knew how I was experiencing this moment of being alive – I was being either angry or sad or frightened or euphoric. Then I would ask myself questions that lead to an in-depth exploration of the feeling in question – what triggered it, when did it first occur, why am I so emotional about the particular situation, what part of my identity does this relate to, etc. I would poke around, question and reflect until I had a sufficient experiential understanding of the issue at hand. Most often this process needed to be repeated time and again as I reacted in a similar way to a particular issue and I only concluded the investigation when there was the satisfying insight that allowed me to drop and dissolve the issue once and for all. 2. Do you see any use in setting up a chat room for actualism discussions? Personally I enjoy and prefer the current medium of the mailing list, where everyone receives everything that is been talked about and can then comment or not in his or her own time, pace and manner. With the mailing list as it is, writing about actualism does not interfere with living my life as I find appropriate.
Footnote: 1.) Richard: Fear is both the ego
(‘I’ in the head) and the soul (‘me’ in the heart) ... ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’. The extinction of identity in
toto (both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul) is simultaneously the extinction of all fear ... forever. Richard, List B, No 57 Vineeto’s & Richard’s Text ©The Actual Freedom Trust: 1997-. All Rights Reserved. |
