What I’m looking at now is should I even talk to you at all? That doesn’t seem like a good alternative to me because the world is full of people who are not honest including me sometimes. I know that I can just not read what you write and not talk to you and I can go on feeling good and everything will be alright. However, this seems like avoidance to me. Every time I have tried discussing anything with you it has turned into a nightmare with me being made wrong just as you have done this time. Should I just talk to you and treat it as a joke or should I even talk to you at all? Neither one of those alternatives seem right either. Just thinking about sending this is stirring up my feeler so why should I? I guess because I want to eliminate this feeler and looking at it seems better than avoiding it. I’ve tried to pinpoint what it is and hate seems as close as I can get although I’m thinking that there is fear underneath it. What am I afraid of? Authority comes to mind. You obviously wield authority here and you obviously have Richard and Peter on your side so what kind of fair shake can I get going up against the Actual Freedom Trust?

Also, you assume a teacher role and you aren’t even honest and don’t know what you are talking about so we can’t just talk as equals because you pretend that you are above me and know more than me when deep down I really think that you are no more than a lying idiot.

I must admit I was flabbergasted as to why you would inform me about of the above as these are your feelings and only you can deal with them. The only tentative sense I could make of it is that, given that this is the actual freedom mailing list set up to talk about how to become free from the human condition, you may want some help as to what to do with these feelings that seem to occur in regular intervals.

If you could put aside your notion that I am ‘no more than a lying idiot’ for a few minutes then I can tell you what I did – and what worked for me.

At the start of actualism I had to get off my spiritually-fed moral high horse and stop pointing the finger(s) at everyone else and blaming everyone else for my feelings in order to single-pointedly focus my attention on the human condition *in me*. I had to rethink my notions of ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘fair’ because life if neither right nor good nor fair and ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘fair’ are simply human-made morals and ethics varying according to culture, religion, and oscillating according to fashion and circumstances. I also had to rigorously question what I considered to be ‘true’ and ‘correct’ because my ‘truths’ were almost all based on borrowed knowledge and the rest was based on instinctive intuition and affective memories.

I had to acknowledge that my anger was my anger, no matter who or what had caused it, that my sadness was my sadness no matter which sympathy or compassion for whom might have caused it or who/what had disappointed my expectations, that my desire was my desire no matter what situation or person had caused it to arise, that my fear was my fear regardless of who or what had triggered it. Needless to say that this focussing on ‘me’ also helped me to be rid of any feelings regarding authority as the insights gained from my PCEs allowed me to stand on my own two feet for the first time in my life so much so that I could easily learn from those I wanted to learn from and reject revered knowledge from others without being bothered by feelings of inferiority or pride – after all feelings regarding authority are all but an ego-soul struggle for power and struggling for power is irrelevant when freedom from my own ‘self’ is at stake.

PS: What you call ‘you obviously wield authority here’ is simply me reporting what I found to be the case from my experience and what you call ‘you obviously have Richard and Peter on your side’ is simply that their experiences of actuality and facts matches mine (mostly). Life is very, very simple when it is not stuffed up by one’s feelings.

I might still not be at ease regarding the everyday mundane repetitive tasks and once I start enjoying even those, I would think that I have changed for good.

Part of being able to enjoy ‘everyday mundane repetitive tasks’ for me was to have a close look at what was really necessary. For instance I decided to reduce my overheads in order to be able to sell less of my time for money. Having adjusted the balance of my time as compared to ‘their’ time it was then much easier to enjoy the time I had to sell for money and the fact that when I do my work well this in itself is a satisfying activity helped in enjoying the process of it.

The other thing with ‘everyday mundane repetitive tasks’ was that I had to look at some underlying resentments – as if someone else was making me do those task and not that I had in fact chosen the situation where those tasks were a necessary part of my life. For instance, what’s the point of objecting to having to wash the dishes when I clearly made the choice that I prefer to eat from clean dishes rather than have last night’s dinner still on them? Once I am aware, and am able to determine, that all I do is in fact my own choice, if possible my deliberate choice, then any resentment goes out the window. And without resentment any task can be a joy, a sensate pleasure or a mental challenge to do, if only I apply enough attentiveness to all that is involved in accomplishing it.

I clearly see the sense behind your approach… but I still have the ‘resentment’. The feeling inside me refuses to go away… the silliness expresses itself as postponement and switching to more enjoyable tasks. Most of it is gone but still something is left. I have some task to do which is not all that bad but still I seem to prefer reading a book and reflecting about things rather than doing the task at hand. I am not sure how to get rid of this basic resentment. Any more tips on this aspect would be welcome.

You are aware, are you, that you make a choice, each moment again, to hang onto the resentment in favour of taking on the challenge of enjoying the task at hand?

Nobody said that becoming actually or virtually free from malice and sorrow (resentment being a facet of sorrow) was effortless and on the way personal sacrifices have to be made in order to achieve your goal. Your resentment is one of those sacrifices required.

Courage!

On the same topic you recently wrote to No 60 saying that ‘I hate it when she does this and the hate is making me sick’–

No 60: Same kind of thing that’s happening all over the place with Vineeto. Her statement ‘only enlightened beings are without ego’ was clearly and obviously wrong. You pointed it out. Instead of acknowledging the obvious truth then and there, she’s once again straight onto the front foot trying to shove a red herring down your throat, telling you what YOU don’t understand, etc, etc, etc. On and on it goes.

Yes, I agree. This is the part with her where I start getting sick so I’m trying to look at that and see exactly what it is. I think you nailed it but I don’t know why that reactivates my feeler. It seems like it has to do with not getting to be right even when I am sure I am right and prove I am right. But still there is more to it than that. I think it has to do with hate. I hate it when she does this and the hate is making me sick. 25.8.2006

If it is of assistance to you, here is what I have observed in myself in regards to facts and feelings –

• When there is no doubt in my mind that what the other is saying about me is non-factual I usually have no emotional response at all. For instance when you called me religious worshipper, blind, obsessed and that I am defending my ego, I knew for a fact that this is not the case and consequently there was not even a hint of an emotion. Just like when someone says 5+5 is 55 or 12 there is no reason for me to get upset about it.

• When there is a possibility that what someone else says about me could have some facticity to it or could be partially right then often feelings of doubt and uncertainty arise, maybe coupled with fear and/or defensiveness. Nowadays with the actualism method these situations provide the opportunity for me to look at what has been said, sort out fact from imagination, my emotions from the other’s emotions and once I am satisfied that I know the facts, then the emotion subsides.

• There is a third possibility that I remember well from my frequent power battles with my previous partner about 15 to 20 years ago – certain situations in which I knew damn well that he had the facts on his side but I would not want to admit it and worse, I could not divert him from the topic, confuse him or make him feel wrong (which I was usually quite good at). In those situations I sometimes had intense feelings of hate, not only for reasons of my hurt pride of loosing the battle but particularly because I had sold my integrity in defending what I knew to be lies merely in order to win the battle. Needless to say that nowadays I know in advance how silly it would be to put myself into such a situation and therefore I don’t.

I am not saying that anything of the above should apply to you – only you can know yourself. I just thought I’d share my own experience with facts and associated feelings as you were contemplating about your own feelings in this situation.

Have you ever felt aggression, hatred, condescension or any other negative feelings at all when you read correspondences of No 16, No 65, No 58, No 60, No 23, No 71 or anybody else? None of the above mails triggered any negative feelings at all?

As I am not free from the human condition I do have feelings from time to time, although ‘aggression, hatred, condescension’ are not amongst them. That said, I do find some posts from correspondents rather silly when they waste their time concentrating on red herrings or fighting against imaginary windmills instead of talking about the issues at hand, namely how to become free from the human condition. On many occasions I understand the reasons for this behaviour as I too had to struggle in the early days with similar resistance to looking at my own feelings and beliefs rather than blaming others for my feelings and instinctively defending my beliefs.

If not, do you have a ‘feeling’ when you read/reply? What is the ‘feeling’?

No, not when I reply. Even when I occasionally have one or the other feeling when reading a post, I never write, let alone click ‘send’, when I am in any way emotional. Very early on in actualism I understood that the way to deal with one’s emotions is to neither suppress nor express them and since then I have always made it a point to keep my hands in my pocket, so to speak, until I have investigated/abandoned any emotional issues that may have arisen.

Is it that of caring, friendliness?

The reason I reply to correspondence on this mailing list and share my experience with the actualism process, which often involves correcting misunderstandings and misrepresentations, is that of fellow-ship regard which is different to the feeling of ‘caring, friendliness’ in that it is actual rather than affective.

Dull listlessness and resentfulness are indeed feelings and not very pleasant ones at that – indeed they can literally ruin your day.

If, as you say, feeling dull listlessness and resentment is practically your default state, regardless of whatever current events or current circumstances or personal interactions, then I can only suggest that you may need to take a good look as to why this is so. In other words, rather than focussing on details at this stage, maybe a general overall assessment or stocktaking as to whether or not you want to be free of these feelings and whether or not you are willing to pay the price that this change will involve may well be in order.

I am reminded of what you wrote to Richard recently –

• Why ‘must’ there be more to life than the miserable reality people live in?

• The universe is not predisposed to good or bad there’s no reason to expect life to be happy.

• Also, ‘meaning’ is of human invention life and the universe can’t have a purpose or meaning.

• If misery helped survival, having miserable humans would be blind nature’s perfection.

With a default attitude towards life and the universe such as this it comes to no surprise that the feelings of dullness, resentment and listlessness are the predominant ones for you and having such an attitude demonstrates well why it is necessary to investigate all of one’s beliefs, attitudes, worldviews and philosophical outlooks towards life if one wants to become happy and harmless.

Whenever I could not remember which particular incident, event or circumstance had triggered my last outbreak of feeling bad I would look around inside, as it were, and find the belief/ attitude/ worldview/ outlook that fed and maintained my current feeling-state. Equipped with this information I then did whatever was needed to feel good again in order to be able to have a closer look at, become more aware of and, if necessary, understand comprehensively the underlying feeling pattern – the belief system – that had caused me to feel miserable in the first place.

*

To No. 101: ‘When you practice the actualism method, it’s important to remember to examine the feeling in question only after you managed to get back to feeling good’

Have you ever watched a child getting upset when their favourite toy is taken away by another child for instance and then the mother or teacher steps in and diverts their attention by pointing to a bird flying by or a showing them a fragrant colourful flower or inviting them to join a different game that’s going on. Young children are usually able to very quickly forget their previous upset and accept the nudge to being happy again whereas adults often insist on the seriousness/ importance of their own particular problem and/or feeling and choose to continue to feel bad.

When you set your aim to become happy and harmless you enter into an agreement with yourself, so to speak, to not let anything stand in the way of getting back to feeling good – in other words you make a conscious decision to make feeling good about being here, right now, your default feeling state. This intent in turn helps to re-kindle one’s own long-lost naiveté which then helps you to return to feeling good for no other reason than that you are alive and conscious in this spectacular abundant universe. As an adult you have the added bonus of being able to take note of the triggers that had caused you to stop feeling good in order to avoid this particular pitfall the next time round.

When I was first starting to practise actualism, I was doing something that sounded a lot like what No 00’s describing. basically, figuring out how the instincts work. I was taking my emotional state as a black box and watching very carefully which inputs resulted in what outputs, and further, how some of those outputs had a tendency to make me want certain inputs. I was surprised at some of the results... it turned out that what I wanted was pretty different from what I thought I wanted. the desires for being, power, and sex, and continuity of being (different from just the desire for being, somehow... like a restless drone in the background) lent their influence in so many ways, and apparently, almost always continuously.

I stopped doing it because even though it was fun and there were a couple big break-throughs, eventually I just hit a lot of dead ends. It took more energy than I had to keep doing it, so I lost interest and decided to just pay more attention to sensate experiencing and enjoying myself.

I like your description of the black box of undeterminable feelings. It demonstrates well that when you ‘have’ feelings, as an outsider, so to speak, they remain strange and mysterious. Once I acknowledged that I am my feelings and my feelings are me, then I found myself right in the midst of the ‘black box’ and my feelings became more accessible, more observable, less mysterious and volatile.

I could easily see in what way I could replace a feeling compassion for the suffering all of human kind (which has no tangible effect whatsoever except on me who is feeling it) with an active and tangible change in the way I treat people in my immediate surrounding.

I always have difficulty with this one.

You are not the first. Here is an example of what someone wrote many years ago with a remarkably similar agenda to your own –

You might have stumbled upon something richard but at the rate your going someone else with enough intelligent and love for his fellow human beings to learn how to communicate is going to get the actualism message across because your failing miserably. An Observation, Listbot, Mon 12.9.1999

It is simply not possible to preserve the good emotions and discard, or distance oneself from, the bad emotions – this has been tried for 5000 years of recorded history and peace on earth is nowhere in sight. If you want to be free from the human condition then the instinctual passions will have to go as a whole package, nurture included.

Why does actualism/actualists see the good feelings as ineffective motivators of practical actual caring, i.e. compassion as having [quote] "no tangible effect whatsoever except on me who is feeling it [unquote] but eagerly acknowledges the bad feelings as motivating all the murder and mayhem in the world?

In a ‘self’-less pure consciousness experience it is readily observable that both the loving and desirable feelings as well as the hostile and invidious feelings are but two sides of the same coin and arise both out of the instinctual animal survival package. Not only are the good feelings ‘ineffective to eliminate suffering and violence, they actually contribute to it. Emotional caring only cares for those one feels connected with and will always exclude those who don’t fall into that category. Furthermore, actualism doesn’t state that ‘all the murder and mayhem’ is only motivated by the bad feelings but that it is caused by the whole of the instinctual survival package every human is endowed with at birth.

The best practical actually caring thing anyone can do is to become aware of their own instinctually driven feelings and passions in order to stop imposing them on their fellow human beings.

My experience with becoming gradually free from aspects of my identity is that as those aspects fall away I gradually forget that they ever existed. As such I not only not miss those aspects that I left behind but I often wonder what all the fuss is/was about.

For me, nipping in the bud comes mainly into play when I have already understood the core of the problem and need to entirely erase a persistent visceral habit. For instance when I applied myself to investigating the issue of love, I fairly quickly understood the dream that lays behind the pining feeling of love and awareness revealed the manipulating possessiveness of the feeling of love. However, it took me much longer to detect these feelings the moment they arose and to disempower the emotional feel-good hooks and tentacles before they had a chance to really take hold. Such feelings seem to have a life of their own until ongoing attentiveness and a sustained period of ‘nipping in the bud’ finally cut them dry.

I know well the seductive temptation to dramatize ‘me’ under the guise of ‘self’-exploration (and most Western therapy groups thrive on this tool of ‘self’-enhancement) – that’s why the pure intent to become free from the human condition in toto is essential. After I decided to give actualism a go I recognized that this would involve abandoning all that I had tried in the past – I would describe this turn-around as ‘cutting the crap and getting out of misery as fast as possible’.

My experience is that one does not need to exaggerate feelings as attentiveness itself reveals not only the invidious nature of affective feelings but it also reveals the full range of affective feelings whether it be from feeling slightly annoyed to being overcome by blind rage, from feeling a mild ennui to plummeting into gut-wrenching despair, from feeling a little worried to sinking into a full-blown paranoia, from feeling a little detached to plunging into a dissociative state, and so on. No need for exaggeration as every human being has the capacity to feel the feel the full gamut of affective feelings.

For me to keep my hands in my pocket while neither repressing, nor expressing nor acting upon my feelings but allowing myself to feel the feeling in order that I could be attentive to the nature of the particular feeling whilst it is happening was extremely sensible advice. This allows me to put the feeling in a bind – it is like holding the feeling under a microscope rather than letting it go unobserved or letting it run rampant as is normally the case.

*

On the way to an actual freedom the apparent ‘price’ I pay is in fact a gradual unburdening of unnecessary emotional baggage and silly worries – i.e. nothing at all valuable is lost on the way while a valuable and delicious freedom is gained. It’s a win-win situation.

What I found was that the ‘background noise’ is actually the engine of ‘me’ running all the time ready to flare up at any given opportunity. Although the opportunities to ‘flare’ become more and more rare, given that I am no longer bait for most of the usual follies and passions, the engine noise will only stop when ‘I’ am finally extinct.

Once I got tired of berating myself for feeling worried and being emotional I decided to focus on eliminating the ‘silly’ actions that produced stress in my life. As an example, I found that having less material goods and less financial security meant that I needed to work less which then gave me less to be stressed about, more time for myself and thus more time to sort myself out. I also found that the more I considered the effect my words and actions would have on others, the less fearful I had to be of people in general to the point where the fear subsided and I found that I actually like other people as fellow human beings. (See also: richard/audiotapeddialogues/puttingtheotherbeforeoneself.htm)

Something Richard said recently made me prick up my ears. I was telling him about something that worried me during the previous week and he said ‘it doesn’t make sense, it must be a feeling’.

In my experience with the actualism method, I didn’t nip many emotions in the bud until I was certain that the whole issue that brought on the emotion had been examined and clearly understood.

By neither repressing nor expressing an emotion I have opportunity to ask some investigative questions, either in the situation, if I am not too upset, or some time afterwards when the worst of the storm has passed. My questions go something like this – what brought on the emotional reaction, what is the underlying cause, what is the reoccurring theme, what is the belief behind it, what is it I particularly hold dear that caused my getting upset, what part of my identity feels insulted, threatened, annoyed, etc., what action do I possibly need to take in order to prevent a reoccurring of my upset, and finally, what part of ‘me’ do I need to let go of in order to permanently become free from this particular emotional reaction?

Some emotional reactions I could easily dismiss as being plain silly such as complaints about the weather, about obstacles in the traffic, about people being late, and so on. These situations merely needed a change of attitude, some attentiveness to stop the old habit and then the emotion would not occur again by my sheer determination not to let such trivia bug me. For those issues that needed no further inquiry, nipping any upcoming emotional reaction in the bud was the perfect and only sensible solution.

Other issues took more inquisitiveness, attentiveness, guts and intent to look at the uncomfortable dark side of ‘me’ in order to get to the bottom of reoccurring emotional reactions. For instance, when I first met Peter I had a lot of male-female issues that caused me to get upset which could only be resolved by me finding out the facts of the matter and then letting go of my various idea, opinions, beliefs and feelings around being a woman, i.e. my social identity of being a woman.

Another area that needed extensive exploration had to do with my feelings of love and loyalty for my former spiritual teacher. I began to inch my way into slowly questioning the sensibility of being loyal in the face of blatant contradictions between his teachings and his behaviour and his promises and the actual outcome of practicing his teachings, but for a while each time someone else said something against him I flared up, so much so that for the first 3 months Peter and I agreed to not talk about ‘the war’. It was clear for me that this could only be a temporary measure and I steadily proceeded with finding out the facts of the matter despite my reoccurring feelings of fear, doubt, suspicion, defensiveness, treachery and abandonment that this course of action could sometimes create. Those feelings only permanently disappeared when I managed to irrevocably let go of my identity of being a follower, a member of the clan, a worshipper and lover of a Godman, a New-Age goody-two-shoes and a spiritual seeker and believer.

From those two examples you can see that the actualism method is not a superficial tool to make bad feeling go away – it is, when used correctly, a powerful instrument for radical, i.e. eradicating, change. It’s my identity I willingly let go of when I apply attentiveness and understanding and as a consequence the feelings that were produced and maintained by the respective parts of my identity also disappear.

As an analogy, you could say that the good and bad feelings are only the tip of the iceberg, the tangible aspect of one’s identity. As such, when I pay increasing attention as to how I experience this moment of being alive, increasing parts of the iceberg, ‘me’, come to the surface – and this is a necessary process if one is to bring one’s ‘self’ to the light for progressive dissolution.

For me, abandoning my beliefs was the conscious and deliberate determination to peel away all the conditioning I had taken on board in my life that prevents me from experiencing the magic and perfection that I had experienced in my first major pure consciousness experience.

In order to peel away the layers of ‘me’, the social and instinctual identity I had clearly seen as standing in the way of experiencing the magic of this actual physical universe, I found that it wasn’t enough merely to question my beliefs (or the beliefs of others) for questioning sake, as I had done before. Also, it wasn’t sufficient to question what I considered to be beliefs, mine or other’s – I had to dig into what I felt to be unquestionably true and what I was sure to be right in order to determine whether they were fact and whether they worked in practice.

In other words, I made a deliberate decision to uncover my beliefs in order to abandon them, beliefs that were disguised as truths, held by me as well as my peer group to be valid and right, good and fair. What made them appear to be right and true were not only my own passionate feelings but the fact that others around me also felt them to be true.

Given that beliefs are nothing other than emotion-backed thoughts the task to uncover my beliefs was fairly easy in principle – whenever I got upset about what someone said I could then reasonably assume that one of my dearly held beliefs or values was challenged. In practice, however, it was often not so easy because each belief I uncovered in fact challenged the very person I felt myself to be.

So, the answer to your question ‘what’s left when all beliefs and ideas including the spiritual is abandoned?’ in my experience was that what is left is the feeler. Consequently I then began to investigate the feelings that do not necessarily have beliefs attached to them but that nevertheless stand in the way of me being unconditionally happy and harmless – the necessary prerequisite to becoming free from one’s ‘self’ altogether.

How to link the identity to my feelings? That’s easy – the pure consciousness experience makes it undeniably clear that ‘I’, the social and instinctual identity, am a feeling identity … therefore any affective feeling is always an articulation of one’s identity in action. Even if one does not have a clear memory of having had a PCE, the simple act of being attentive experientially reveals that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’.

When I began to pay exclusive attention to this moment of being alive I soon became aware that my social and instinctual identity thrives on gloomy and antagonistic feelings as well as loving and compassionate feelings whereas feeling happy and delighted deprives the identity of its nourishment. Hence Richard’s method to minimize both the good and the bad feelings while activating and enhancing the felicitous feelings made imminent sense.

This method is not to be confused with the spiritual method of not identifying or not associating with one’s feelings and thoughts – as in the Buddhist practice of detachment – as this practice only serves to create a new pseudo identity, an identity who actively dis-identifies from unwanted aspects of one’s old identity. In actualism I readily acknowledge that ‘I’ in toto am the problem and then proceed to facilitate ‘my’ demise.

As for ‘how did you investigate those feelings’, i.e. those feelings that don’t necessarily have beliefs attached to them – I found that there was no need to make a distinction between feelings with beliefs and feelings without beliefs. Given that my aim is to eliminate ‘me’, the identity, in toto, any feeling that prevents me from being happy and harmless is acknowledged, felt and labelled as it arises, neither expressed nor suppressed but attentively observed, in order that I can then either nip it in the bud or, if need be, explore and understand it fully so as to then be able to abandon it.

Feelings connected with beliefs inevitably surfaced whenever the particular belief was challenged. The only way to completely disempower the feelings is to abandon the belief – no belief, no need to feel defensive, feel aggrieved, feel the need to attack and so on. Even when I thought I had eliminated my major beliefs, such as my religious and spiritual beliefs, I would nevertheless discover yet more beliefs that I had inadvertently taken on board and these beliefs made themselves apparent by the fact that I got upset or sad or irritated about what someone said or did.

Undertaking an exploration of one’s own feelings when and as they are occurring – becoming fascinated with the business of being alive – is the means to developing apperceptive awareness, a prerequisite to becoming free of the human condition itself.

‘Now it seems important to identify the more subtle feelings, moods and affections that indicate ‘me’ coming to the foreground. And they are more the ‘good’ feelings and the ‘no-feelings’ – as I called them once – that I need to be aware of.’ http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/actualism/vineeto/list-af/alan-d.htm#23.4.2000

The word I would use now, in hindsight, for those ‘no-feelings’ of lack-lustre and listlessness is resentment of being here. Within the human condition there is a basic resentment of not wanting to be here, wanting to be somewhere else, waiting for something else to happen than what is happening now as a basic attitude to life which is then reinforced by the various religious and spiritual conditioning that life on earth is essentially suffering and that the real life will only happen for the spirit after you die.

This resentment to being here, as this body, in the world-as-it-is with people-as-they-are, was what was responsible for my dull feelings, no-feelings, my listlessness, my boredom, my waiting for something else to happen, in short, it had permeated almost all experience of life in that it had cast a dulling shade over everything I experienced.

The way to deal with resentment in the actualism method is the same way you deal with all other feelings that interfere with you being happy and harmless – when paying attention how you experience this moment of being alive, you notice it, then label it which helps you realise that it would be silly to carry on with it when you can instead enjoy being alive. With a steady increase in attentiveness the shift of resenting being here to appreciating being here becomes progressively easier until you finally kick the insidious habit of resentment altogether and delight in being alive for the simple reason that you are alive.

As ‘I’ am a feeling ‘being’ I cannot experience life devoid of feelings (unless in a PCE) – any ‘no-feelings’ are still feelings of dullness, lacklustre-ness, listlessness, resentment or boredom or are the result of one repressing one’s feelings and as such are not neutral at all.

From the three kinds of feelings – good feelings, bad feelings and felicitous feelings – the felicitous feelings are in fact the neutral feelings in that they render ‘me’ useless as my experience of life is already enchanting and delightful while both the good and the bad feelings give ‘me’ credence and sustenance and thus increase the dominance of ‘me’ as a feeler.

As Richard recommends –

I can recommend that one minimises the effect that both the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ feelings have on you (the enhancement of the ‘good’ feelings has been tried and tried again and again and has failed and failed again and again). The affective energy previously channelled into the vain attempt to combat the ‘bad’ with the ‘good’ is now released to expand the felicitous feelings which, along with sensuousness (another no-no in spirituality) and naiveté‚ will result in a wide-eyed wonder which may very well eventuate in apperceptiveness ... given sufficient pure intent to bring about peace-on-earth by allowing the already always existing perfection to become apparent. Richard, List AF, No 12b, 27Feb99

Freedom from the Human Condition – Happy and Harmless

Vineeto’s Text © The Actual Freedom Trust