Please note that Vineeto’s correspondence below was written by the actually free Vineeto
(List D refers to Richard’s List D and his Respondent Numbers) Vineeto’s Correspondence with Felix on Discuss Actualism Forum July 29 2024 VINEETO: Hi Felix, This is a very good description of your struggles with the actualism method and the insights you obtained from it what to do and especially what not to do. FELIX: Part of the “secret” of actualism seems to be that the road is only wide once you are past a lot of your own obstacles. In my case the entrance to the road might as well have been a pinhole. I remember Geoffrey saying something similar back in the day. I don’t mean to make it sound hard, I’m just stating how it was for me. VINEETO: Given that you say “the entrance to the road might as well have been a pinhole” – perhaps this very simple suggestion might help you to find the wide and wondrous path in future. When some strong emotion occurs, mark this as a flashing red light. Red light in traffic means STOP. Not just go slow but stop. Don’t cross the road when the red light is flashing, not in traffic and not in the actualism method. Before thinking about the trigger, the emotion, the problem, do whatever you can to get to feeling neutral, then to feeling (reasonably) good. Play a game, have a shower, have a cuppa, anything to get to feeling neutral. Then, and only then, you can try to contemplate the silliness of feeling bad – [Respondent]: How does the mere seeing how silly it is make us happy once again? [Richard]: Because nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth getting malicious or miserable about (let alone compensatingly loving and compassionate) when the realisation that this moment is the only one there ever is becomes the actuality it already always is. (Richard, List D, No. 11, 24 November 09) Only when you feel good and you can look at the problem, which caused you to feel bad, in a *dispassionate* way, only then your contemplation and investigation and puzzling things out is worthwhile and can lead to some sensible results and even resolution. FELIX: I know I used to write a lot about “actively enjoying” etc but what I was really trying to do back then was to go over the self….like trying to override my real desires and feelings and instincts and resentment for being alive by brute force. It’s not the way. You can’t pretend that the self is not there, and then abuse it or suppress it or manipulate it to get some outcome. The self needs to be treated with care, graciously and gently like you’d treat a little kid almost. It will cling so hard to what it thinks it wants with a powerful grip, and investigating is a way of gently prying it’s toys away from its little hands. VINEETO: That is spot on. “You can’t pretend that the self is not there” because that pretence *is* the self, creating its own duplicate, pretending to having a fight with itself – in order to distract you from feeling good. It’s a pure diversion tactic. Once you wake up to this cunning pattern, it will be easier not to fall for the same trick over and over again I wouldn’t say that “the self needs to be treated with care”, as if you and the self are not one and the same, rather that you need to learn to be a friend to yourself. That means sometimes it (which is ‘you’) needs gentle guidance via pure intent, sometimes ‘you’, the more sensible adult needs to step in to call an end to a tantrum-throwing angry child. Calling an end means STOP, as described above. That means sometimes it (which is ‘you’) needs gentle guidance via pure intent, sometimes ‘you’, the more sensible adult needs to step in to call an end to a tantrum-throwing angry child. Calling an end means STOP, as described above. I wish you great success. Cheers Vineeto August 8 2024 VINEETO: Hi Felix, Thank you for your appreciation and the message full of good news. FELIX: One thing I’m starting to see a LOT of is the role of shame in hampering real investigation. Identifying as the thinker, and too scared and ashamed to face my “dangerous” feelings, I only ever knew how to beat myself up and suppress unwanted emotions. I felt and believed deep down I was just too bad, an irredeemable “lost cause” who couldn’t live up to Richard or the goal of being happy and harmless. And I had all the feelings to back it up. VINEETO: Now that you are feeling good, even excellent, and with a memory of an outstanding EE only yesterday – can you recognize how shame and feeling ashamed is a mere tactic of you the feeling being, to distract you from changing? And can you also comprehend, how equally your belief that you are “an irredeemable “lost cause” who couldn’t live up to Richard” is a habit, initially a survival habit, which is now no longer necessary nor beneficial to maintain? If you can understand this as a realization then you can decline this belief each time you become aware of it … and in one scoop two large obstacles will be removed and allow you to “not fall back into the same old”. FELIX: Coming back to normal life, this EE has allowed me to up-level, and not fall back into the same old. I can feel that my brain is starting to understand more and more what is working and what isn’t (on a somewhat rudimentary “hotter” or “colder” basis). As such feeling bad feels wrong, and is much easier to untie – especially by tracing back to last night. Anyway just wanted to drop a line. Cheers! VINEETO: Yes! That is exactly it – “feeling bad feels wrong” and a clear indicator towards more and more enjoying and appreciating being here and being alive right now. It’s wonderful to behold. Cheers Vineeto October 29 2024 FELIX: Just wanted to say that today my entire place in the world has shifted. It’s like I reached the very limit of my solutions, and being all out of ammunition, I could only give in to the ease and delight of being here. This feeling good state arose so naturally, and had no airs or pretence. There was no neediness to it, or doubt, or self castigation, or frustration, or burn out, or anything else. VINEETO: Hi Felix, This is great. It looks it “arose so naturally” … but you also know why it happened – you “reached the very limit of my solutions”. This is worth printing and sticking on your fridge as a reminder. Whenever ‘your’ solutions, i.e. your habitual reactions and responses, don’t work to make you feel good and delightful, stand still and allow the shift, and allow to happen what has happened today. I remember that similar shifts happened to you a few times before, but you forgot, or didn’t recognize how they came about, and eventually your habitual responses took over and introduced stress and seriousness again. This time you can pay attention at the slightest diminishment of your present state of feeling good and catch it at the beginning before it can slip and revert back to the serious, stressful way of life. This “noticing” is nothing serious, just a bit of attention, now that you know again how *good* it feels to feel good. With an intent to keep feeling good and paying attention you can keep feeling good. FELIX: I stood there and questioned, from this point of view, my whole orientation towards life. Not in some mindfucky way, but just a kind of “noticing” of that feeling good quality. Why couldn’t this be my default state? VINEETO: Exactly, why couldn’t it! Now you can *actualize* this realization in this matter-of-fact way you experience today. FELIX: This was very matter of fact, not having to “reach” for something ethereal or divine. Clarity and sensibility came in and cleaned up a lot of stuff. I realised this actualism thing is not so damn serious. My life isn’t so damn serious. And I did not have to be the absolute genius of the world or climb a metaphorical Mt Everest in order to just be here. I saw it was more like a subtle shift in adjustment that was needed. Not a big deal…no need for pressure. VINEETO: Yes, and that is the very proof that you have all the tools – the intelligence, the basic understanding which is needed to reach this “subtle shift in adjustment” … now the question is, do you have the right amount of (non-serious but sincere) intent to keep it going and make feeling good indeed your “default state”? You can do it if you want it ♫♪ ♫ ♪ Cheers Vineeto November 3 2024 FELIX: Hey Vineeto, Glad to report that what is happening now is not a repetition of the same cycles I have experienced for the last 4 or 5 years. There are two things happenings: 1. I seem to have brought my ongoing “chronic stress condition”, with its concomitant escape/addiction issues (mainly sexual) and warped perceptions to an end, at last. In a nutshell…and without wanting to make it sound too easy….you could say I FINALLY learned to decline to go down my usual self-sabotaging routes. Since then, feeling good has been arising very easily – which is all quite simple and delightful. I’m just inviting it more and more, which is as much about staying out of the way and not getting triggered than anything else. Whereas before, I was in fact a traumatised psyche – effectively “permatriggered” – and so there was (seemingly) no place of safe feeling good to aim for or go back to. VINEETO: Hi Felix, What good tidings! According to your report you seem to have said a final goodbye to your “chronic stress condition” due to your “escape/addiction issues”. What an incredible success. After all, you had indulged in it and suffered from it long enough to have grown tired of it and finally “learned to decline”. Well done. And now the next stage – to get used to “not getting triggered” so that you can continue feeling good. FELIX: I’m reminded how Richard once told me his main goal using the actualism method originally was “to not get triggered”. That makes a LOT of sense now – it is just so much easier to be feeling good first and then avoid triggers. 2. My overall “window” into the world, seen through my eyes but experienced in a 3D physical sense, is totally changing. My nervous system has relaxed, I feel much more comfortable in my body and everything around me is much more pleasurable. I am experiencing that holiday feeling. It’s amazing to experience myself so differently and so all of a sudden. The deep fears that were lashing and lacerating me with stress minute in minute out are gone and I’m starting to feel rejuvenated and healthy. VINEETO: This sounds truly wonderful. The great thing is that despite your long “chronic stress condition” you still remember how the actualism method works and now you can finally benefit putting it into practice. Now is the right time, the “holiday feeling” time, to get used to being attentive enough to avoid any triggers, and if they do happen to get back to feeling good as quickly as possible. FELIX: Now that I’m getting used to feel good it’s making it a lot easier to “rewire” myself. Letting go of beliefs is much much easier, as affectively I am no longer tied to them, indulging them or enslaved to them. Now, in a relaxed way I’m making sure I don’t go back to my old ways. I wouldn’t want to anyway. VINEETO: This is an excellent plan, this is the meaning of what you do “in the meantime” … to enjoy and appreciate, and this way life can only get better and better. I am so pleased for you, you had given yourself such a hard time. Cheers Vineeto November 7 2024 VINEETO: Hi Felix, So many good posts and insights! Before you end up stressing yourself from the sheer amount of what you want to do differently, let me comment on some of what you wrote – FELIX: Probably the biggest thing I’ve found is this. So much of my “determination” and “drive” to pursue actualism has been driven by FEAR. This fear points away from itself oh so cunningly …. I’d even wake up already stressed, and then of course you feel fearful and want to escape. Which can either be something actualism related or something completely different. For me it has pointed me towards being intense about actualism, being very very hard on myself, and trying as hard as possible. VINEETO: And: FELIX: This was my way of trying to put a lid on the feeling being. To not be caring toward myself or others. This lack of friendliness within caused my nervous system to absolutely tighten and freeze and lock up - pretty much on an ongoing basis. I just wanted to shut everything down and “achieve” what I needed to. I didn’t want to mess things up so I ignored myself. Now, I feel I am finally doing something different. There is a sensitivity, an attentiveness and a WILLINGNESS to just try in a sincere way, without pressure, but plenty of intent. I can feel it all pulling into one energy, it’s very open, and integrated. VINEETO: One of the best help for feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ was Richard’s advice very early on to be a friend to oneself, and given that you have identified this as one of the last things you had paid attention to in your stressful period, here is a timely reminder – [Richard]: One thing I did, way back when I started doing that method, was to make sure I would never, ever, tell myself off for slipping back into the old ways – after all ‘I am only human’ and it is bound to happen from time-to-time – and instead I would pat myself on the back for being astute enough to notice that I had slipped back and thus get on with the business of being happy and harmless again ... and feeling good about myself for being able to do so. It is important to be friends with oneself – only I get to live with myself twenty four hours of the day (other people can and do move away) – and if I am at war with myself, disciplining myself, telling myself off, I am alienating the only person who can truly help me in all this. In short: be nice to yourself, not nasty ... there are already enough people doing that anyway. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 50, 11 October 2003). Whenever you catch yourself being hard on yourself, stop, pat yourself on the back for recognizing this pattern re-emerging, and get back feeling good by declining those ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ demands which are designed to give you a hard time. “A hard time” is a clear sign that you are no longer on the “wide and wondrous path” so you can abandon those with the clear knowledge that they are not part of actualism anyway. FELIX: I have been hunting myself for not being able to turn “myself” into a good person. I’m starting to see that’s the whole game, I’m seeing the limits of being a self – that there is no winning. Why have I tried my whole life to be a winner then? Attempting that is pure stress. I feel ready to do something else, to lose almost, as an action. And it’s like I can feel some support there, that I won’t be “alone in this endeavour”. That it’s possible. VINEETO: Exactly, actualism is not at all about being a “good person” – which is again using real-world values to determine what you ‘should’ do. Being sincere and naïve is far more valuable both for you and for those you interact with. Neither is the aim to be “a winner” (in everything you do) because it comes from the same internalised moral/ethical template. Here is something for you to chuckle about – Richard: Both winning and losing are a fact of life ... nobody, but nobody, can be a winner all of the time, at all things, on all occasions, without exception. Respondent: I see. That is a basic, simple, common sense, matter of fact way of seeing it. And yet I barely was able to discern that that was what you were getting at. Interesting. Richard: The word ‘loser’ does not have anywhere near the same connotations in this neck of the woods (at least not for my generation anyway) as it does in your part of the world ... whereas the word ‘failure’ (as in ‘I am a failure’) does. Speaking personally, and by any objective criteria, I am a failure big-time: I was a high-school dropout; I was a wartime coward/a peacetime pacifist; I was still a teenager when first married/my first marriage was a shotgun wedding; I had a mental breakdown/identity crisis in my early thirties; I lost my sanity, my wife, my family, my house, my car, my business, my career; I was a homeless person for five years/a bare-footed vagrant sleeping rough; I remarried only to lose my second wife, after the loss of insanity, of identity, of feelings, of reality, of truth, due to the total and permanent incapacity to be loving/ compassionate and/or affectionate/ empathetic; I am classified as suffering from a chronic and incurable psychotic disorder/ I am derealised, depersonalised, alexithymic, anhedonic; I have no ambition whatsoever/no aim in life at all; I often sit around doing nothing/ quite thoughtless; I am a teetotaller/I rarely socialise; I neither belong to any public organisation, club, guild, or fraternity/sorority by whatever description, nor go to parties, bars, dances, discos or any other similar social venue; neither do I play competitive sports, support any team or player, or even attend any such sporting events; my main hobbies, apart from boating/ swimming on occasion, are watching television/pottering about the internet; by going public with my life story I am quite often the recipient of derision, disparagement, scorn, mockery, disdain, belittlement, vilification, denigration, contempt, castigation, disapprobation, denunciation, and condemnation (and discrimination as evidenced by bad-mouthing, backbiting, slander, libel, defamation and a whole range of slurs, smears, censures, admonishments, reproaches, reprovals, and so on) and ... and, to cut a long story short, I am currently living in what some call sin (a life of fornication with a live-in divorcée whilst still married to another). What a failure (a loser) I am, eh? (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 68d, 17 October 2005) And yet despite all these failures by societal standards, the identity ‘Richard’ succeeded in what ‘he’ had set as ‘his’ priority in life. And a lot of being able to achieve his ultimate aim was made possible by discovering/ re-awakening his dormant naiveté, which made him both liking and likeable. As such, sorting out your priorities will help you determine in which areas you want to succeed and which ones are rather side-issues. FELIX: This usually reveals the beliefs that are operating. Usually a lot of shoulds about what I should be doing, what I should be achieving, what I need to improve about myself to justify being here. Also some mean questions like why do people not want to be around me, what’s wrong with me? Etc etc. A fried nervous system certainly helps to perpetuate this dynamic. VINEETO: Yep, whenever the way you feel dips below the line of feeling good, you know what to look for. You wrote in a previous message – FELIX: I’m reminded how Richard once told me his main goal using the actualism method originally was “to not get triggered”. That makes a LOT of sense now – it is just so much easier to be feeling good first and then avoid triggers. VINEETO: It sounds like the most sensible line of approach to start with – and when there are too many different triggers, get back to feeling good first and then do one, then perhaps another at your leisure. There are not as many different triggers as you might believe at first. Enjoy. Cheers Vineeto November 11 2024 FELIX: I’m reminded how Richard once told me his main goal using the actualism method originally was “to not get triggered”. That makes a LOT of sense now – it is just so much easier to be feeling good first and then avoid triggers. VINEETO: It sounds like the most sensible line of approach to start with – and when there are too many different triggers, get back to feeling good first and then do one, then perhaps another at your leisure. There are not as many different triggers as you might believe at first. FELIX: Thanks Vineeto your support and encouragement on here has been invaluable. I think what you are doing is really helpful especially when most of us are doing this online and with no one in our lives that knows about it. VINEETO: Hi Felix, You are very welcome Felix. It is such a delight when I see your the feedback in action, that what I write facilitates one or more of you to feel good, or feel better, or puzzle out some apparent obstacle satisfactorily. Here is an example of how someone phrased it well when they puzzled out how best to apply the actualism method as intended – “This is when I first saw this aspect of the actualism method: that, at the end of the day, whatever diminishes enjoyment is just an affective habit to be *declined* and that it is as simple as that. Yes, investigation and exploration are necessary in the beginning to tease out just what that habit is; but once understood, I can just decline so as to have fun sooner than later. In the TMOBA article, Richard alludes to this as “no matter what it is” and “usually some habitual reactive response”. It was amusing to see myself converge on the simplicity of the method as Richard laid out (which, to be frank, has always seemed simplistic!).” And Kuba confirmed this very recently – Kuba: The ‘difficulty’ in actualism is due to the fact that all that ‘I’ have learnt in ‘my’ life was an encumbrance. The ease in actualism is unlocked when one stops being sophisticated haha. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, JesusCarlos, 6 November 2024) So, be sincere and from there allow yourself to be naïve (i.e. unsophisticated, which at the start may look a bit like being a fool to you) and feeling good/great will almost come naturally. Cheers Vineeto November 23 2024 VINEETO: Hi Felix, You are making some good observations. FELIX: One thing I think now is that if I want to be actually free, it follows that I wouldn’t choose to put myself in high pressure situations again and again … I think it’s quite common to slip from an unnoticed “so so” state to a worse state - it’s quite natural in fact because it’s just a more developed version of feeling so so. That’s why it’s much better to catch it early and really develop the familiarity within a substantial feeling good. That’s what I’m working on at the moment. VINEETO: As you have reported that you have lived a long time in this intensity of stress it’s obvious that your sensors (like heat-sensors in the kitchen) need readjusting. Feeling “so so” is already a warning sight, it being on the slope to feeling bad, and you can adjust your sensors, i.e. your affective awareness, about how you experience this moment of being alive, to recognize this as the point to pay immediate attention to. With some sincere (and often fascinating) contemplation (from the vantage point of feeling good) why you developed this stressful habit in the first place you can work out why you were compelled, again and again, “to put myself in high pressure situations again and again”. Long-standing habits like this often have deep roots (for instance a survival strategy once deemed vital but which is no longer needed or even sensible/ salubrious now). Once you experientially understand the affective/ instinctual root of this compulsive past habit, and thus expose it to the bright light of awareness, it loses its previously gripping influence so much so that you eventually will forget you ever had this habit/attitude in the first place. It is quite magical. Cheers Vineeto December 2 2024 FELIX: … for the sake of accuracy let me clear up my own comment. I still meant “feeling state”, I was trying to say that sometimes it’s not just the case of having a feeling but something that is much more stable and fixed like an overarching state (same way someone might get into a loving state). This is very much the nature of states like burnout, depression etc – and it makes getting out of those situations seem a lot more complex. They are even more confusing to navigate than singular feelings which at least rise and then fall in a predictable manner. But what I’ve found with time is that getting out of these states is the exact same as with anything else – getting back to feeling good. It just takes a lot of intent… VINEETO: Hi Felix, I think it is vital that you described your present situation as a “feeling state” because it reveals that not only are a lot of feelings happening but that they are set up in a way to keep each other in place … until you find the capstone of the upside down pyramid, so to speak, and crash the whole “state”. The second quote I posted yesterday (Actualism, ActualVineeto, Frank, 1 December 2024) may be a clue for you – Richard: If it be not fun to track oneself in all of one’s doings then one might as well ‘give up the chase and relax’ ... however what you describe as a modus operandi does not make sense to me (‘go over the same emotions over and over again and the same repetitive thoughts until I give up the chase and relax’). To need to (and to be able to) ‘relax’ means there must be tension in the first place to relax from ... thus the tracking down has changed from tracking down the ‘same emotions’ or the ‘same repetitive thoughts’ to tracking down the tension ... and you did not notice that the game had changed horses in mid-stream. The need to ‘relax’ is a flashing red light that the game-play has changed: ‘when did this tension start?’; how did this tension begin?’; ‘what was the event that initiated this tension?’; ‘what were the feelings at the time?’; ‘what was the thought associated with that feeling?’ ... and so on. Usually one has only to track back a few minutes or a few hours ... yesterday afternoon at the most. Then one is free from both the tension and the ‘Tried and True’ cure of ‘relax’. Speaking personally, I never relaxed in all those years of application and diligence, patience and perseverance ... upon exposure to the bright light of awareness the tension always disappeared. [emphasis added]. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Gary, 28 January 2001). In other words, you are not only looking for one specific feeling but rather what is the stressor, the issue which again and again causes you to feel stressful and anxious. You give three clues – FELIX: For the record I’m not a Buddhist or Vipassana person. As for what caused my burnout, it was life trauma (before I found actualism), though my interpretation of the actualism method made me much more burnt out than I already was. Looking back I can see I was so darn anxious, existing in a slow-burn existential panic, and feeling good seemed impossible at the time. I wanted to become actually free at any cost, but was stuck in functional freeze and had no sensitivity for myself as a feeling being. Meanwhile I was still exhausted and still trying to live up to real world expectations as well. Recipe for disaster really. [emphases added]. VINEETO: So the stressor, the cause for anxiety, is 1) not being friend with yourself, 2) to live up to expectations, and 3) your interpretation of the actualism, which is most likely formed by the same internalized real-world expectations and a disregard for your own well-being. Now you can start looking at such modus operandi and those expectations to find out which are sensible and which are simply not just silly but unliveable. Also, keep in mind that ‘you’, the ‘self’, arising from the instinctual survival passions, is very very cunning when it comes to maintain ‘your’ survival – and will corrupt the very means of escape, the actualism method, and use it to keep you entrapped. For instance, any words written about the actualism methods are tools, not rules – there is a big difference, lol. Here is an idea, the actualism method is not “sudorific” – Richard: I might add, though, that naïveté does away with all that ‘heavy lifting’ you spoke of in an earlier e-mail. Viz.: • [Respondent]: ‘From what I can glean so far, virtual freedom is a period of ‘heavy lifting’. (‘Introduction’; Friday, 27 July 2003). Where you have gleaned this diaphoretic impression from has got me stumped ... here is but one of the many ways I describe the actualism practice: • [Richard]: ‘... the wide and wondrous path to an actual freedom from the human condition is marked by enjoyment and appreciation – the sheer delight of being as happy and harmless as is humanly possible whilst remaining a ‘self’ – and the slightest diminishment of such felicity/ innocuity is a warning signal (a flashing red light as it were) that one has inadvertently wandered off the way. One is thus soon back on track ... and all because of everyday events. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 38, 20 February 2003). Or even more specifically to the point of your ‘heavy lifting’ comment: • [Co-Respondent]: ‘If it is the experiencer that makes efforts to be aware and stay aware, the centre is strengthened, not dissolved, right? • [Richard]: ‘Since when has naiveté been sudorific? (Richard, List B, No 12q, 5 January 2003). In short: if it be not either easy (effortless) or fun (enjoyable) then there is something to look at until it is again. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 46, 9 August 2003). It could well be that an increase in naiveté will do the trick for you as well? It’s easy, ask Ian. Cheers Vineeto December 23 2024 FELIX: I’ve been rememorating the PCE. Basically I do what I did in the restaurant that time. I sit there, and I basically don’t move, and I observe everything that is happening externally and internally. It works to great effect, much more than reminding myself to feel good each moment again a la virtual freedom. hen I find myself getting in the way less and less – it’s almost impossible to stay in the way. The “light of awareness” depowers the feelings and there is more and more to appreciate as this shift happens What I find most of all is that there is a lot less excitement in it, compared to what I aim for when I’m pursuing virtual freedom. I.e. the feeling good that ensues when doing this is not the feeling good what I aim for when applying the method “in daily life”. It takes me to a much more anonymous place, and boy does it feel good, but it’s not “the excitement” of a typical feeling-being good mood, in my opinion. It reminds me of something Geoffrey wrote in his diary one time, it’s in the Zulip archive. It’s about him realizing he had been trying to “maintain a high, with a lot of excitement. I think I’ve come to the same realisation. Feeling good in this sense isn’t really what a feeling being imagines when they are advised to aim for that. It’s much more along the lines of Attentiveness, Sensuosity, Apperception. Once here I just want to bathe in it, it’s so nice to not be under pressure. Of course there is further to go, all the way to the PCE. There really is something to be said for sitting and doing nothing, just chilling and doing this “practice” for quite a while. I think all the people who became free so far did some version of this. Not being busy with other things all the time. And that’s part of making this a singular goal of your life I think. VINEETO: Hi Felix, You hit the jack-pot. And your description of the process is exquisite and easy to follow for everyone who wants the same. It is wonderful to read that you discovered that you can “bathe” in being here in this moment of being alive, with no need for excitement or pressure to be “busy with other things”. That doing so is not just restful but satisfying and fulfilling. With this experience of naiveté as your “singular goal of your life” things will develop of their own accord. “Sitting and doing nothing” whilst enjoying and appreciating this moment of being here is the perfect place from where to invite/allow a PCE to happen – Richard: Now, delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity/ innocuity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all ... and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life ... the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is ... and one is the experiencing of what is happening. But refrain from possessing it and making it your own ... or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared. (Library, Topics, Delight) Cheers Vineeto December 24 2024 FELIX: Thanks for the encouragement! I should add that when I talk about this working “better” than virtual freedom, what I’m discovering is that my moment to moment experience in daily life is very much plagued by feelings, just ones that I’ve come to expect or see as normal or not able to be moved. So the sitting and observing is like an acute practice that allows you to see things that when you’re busy or distracted, are easy to be missed. After last night and went back to my virtual freedom practice of asking HAIETMOBA, I was surprised just how much existential angst, anxiety and resentment I found. VINEETO: Hi Felix, When you have time to contemplate while feeling good I suggest tackling resentment first. It is, with determination to be happy, the easiest of those three major obstacles and free up a lot of tied-up energy to direct to the felicitous feelings. Also, it does rather interfere with being friends with yourself. FELIX: It seems my Achilles heel or a habit has been to want to “override” the whole process by aiming to feel good in an ambitious way, whilst trying to push down or control the seemingly malevolent/ perverse feeling being that is scuppering my efforts. Quite cunning eh. VINEETO: Well, you found yourself out – one cunning trick disarmed now that you know about it. You’ll discover more – it’s the nature of ‘me’ to hide behind the most noble causes, and especially pretend-actualist causes, I noticed. But whenever you ask yourself if this or that strategy is really on your, the actual body’s side, you’ll find that it is not, even if the cover story pretends to be. Anything that is sudorific, anything that creates stress or anxiety can never be on your side. FELIX: In fact I am not sure my diary accurately reflects just how much anxiety and angst I have experienced in the last couple of years. My investigations are now taking me into these places, which before I could not enter easily or which did not seem possible to enter and which I distracted myself in whatever way I could. VINEETO: This is natural, you have to peel the layers one by one, remove the ‘outer’ obstacles first and then get to the layers underneath. Don’t forget to pat yourself on the back for every discovery you make, and then act on. This means stop giving yourself a hard time (merely a bad habit now that you have seen through it) so to be able to enjoy and appreciate. FELIX: Instrumental to this was reading Richard’s writings about fear, specifically that which comes with realisation of being “a contingent being”. RICHARD: Fear – existential angst at finding oneself to be the contingent ‘being’ one always suspected oneself to be – is both the barrier and the way to freedom. Always included in fear is a thrilling aspect, and by focussing upon this and not fear itself, an energy gathers momentum which does the trick for one (thrilling as in an exciting sensation through the body, stirring, stimulating, electrifying, rousing, moving, gripping, hair-raising, riveting, joyful, pleasing, throbbing, trembling, tremulous, quivering, shivering, fluttering, shuddering and vibrating). ‘I’ cannot set ‘myself’ free … but ‘I’ can set in motion a process that will lead to ‘my’ eventual demise. (Richard, List B, No. 12a, 18 July 1998). I have taken this as inspiration to not be so easily stopped by the psychic electric fence which I have been stopped by for quite some time now. A fence built of my own deep fears and angst about actualism and my success with it, my life in general and how it rates, being alone, being scared of how I feel, anxious about how I look etc etc. VINEETO: You probably read what I had written to JesusCarlos as I had used the above quote there. I like your ‘electric fence’ analogy. Here is a quote which should give you comfort, if you understand it right in its context – RICHARD: ... I do remember that discussion well for it spells-out that which I had been wanting to have explicitly set down in words for a long time (the identity inhabiting this body all those years ago had looked in vain for anything detailed in that manner) because it pertains to matters which were the critical factor in the turning-point experiences on some uninhabited islands off the north-eastern seaboard of this country in 1985 ... to wit: the existential angst of discovering that one is nothing but a contingent ‘being’ and that one will cease to ‘be’ unless the redemptive straw, of several doomsday straws, be grasped. (Richard, AF List, No. 82, 27 April 2005). The context being that Richard describes his own experience in the process of extracting himself from enlightenment to find the actual freedom he had experienced in his PCEs. The comforting part is that now we know for certain what is at the other end of this the existential angst and that there is a Direct Route which is a far easier route to an actual freedom. It still needs gutsy pioneers though. FELIX: On top of that, fears about the actual world itself and knowing intellectually that “no one exists” etc – I’ve made myself sick on those sorts of projections. On top of that, resentment about actualism itself – jealousy about how it was so easy/ automatic for Richard, resentment for how difficult it’s been, resentment for having heard about actualism in the first place in some case and how this information has changed my life. VINEETO: You do indeed give yourself a hard time, or have done so in the past. This resentment does fall under the category of anger, you know? Your jealousy is entirely unfounded because Richard did the hardest journey of all without precedence, and it often took perseverance before and after discovering an actual freedom. Let the facts speak for themselves so that you can recognize the silliness of holding on to this particular resentment. (Btw, Richard did not “experience himself of having the mental age of about 14 year old”, he experienced himself of having the existential age of about 14 years old, due to his ongoing naiveté). FELIX: Confronting these sorts of feelings is very scary at times. There is indeed dread, foreboding and all of that. Having these feelings and then also wanting to become actually free so bad, really put me between a rock and a hard place as Kuba put it. I was trying to feel good without really acknowledging all these feelings of “wrongness” in the way. I was dissociated from those feelings, seeing them as immutable, not my fault, and being very much a victim of them. That is quite dangerous I think, if actualism becomes a fight against the feelings themselves. I’ve held on despite getting thrashed around considerably, firstly because I’m determined and secondly because there are others like yourself who have done this and I trust that it does work. I’m writing about my mistakes so others can sidestep them. VINEETO: Here you are seeing through another trick of ‘me’ – the scary feelings are labelled feelings of “wrongness”, i.e. you are ‘bad’ to even have them, let alone feel them, and then you have to suppress them to hide them – perfect way for ‘me’ to avoid change. The result is that you use the cover of ‘your’, the identity’s, idea of actualism to fight yourself and your feelings – to maintain the status quo (anxiety). FELIX: In retrospect it can seem quite easy to say – “of course you shouldn’t feel anxiety or depression or burnout as an actualist; the point is to feel good!”. But I think that ‘take’ underestimates the complexity of the human psyche and what it can cunningly obscure and perpetuate. VINEETO: Even in retrospect ‘you’ still dictate the same course – “you shouldn’t feel anxiety …”. This clearly contradicts the first principle, so to speak – be a friend to yourself. Any ‘should’ is a flashing alarm sign that you wandered off the wide and wondrous path. Here feeling being ‘Vineeto’ wrote about dealing with ‘her’ fear in 1999 – Vineeto: Here is a report on how I have understood and tackled fear: I collected as much information about the actual world as I could get to strengthen my intent. This included reading the journals, talking to Peter and Richard, making use of my intelligence, gathering facts instead of believing people and having a peak-experience with first-hand experience of the actual world. Gathering facts gave me confidence and surety about the journey. I was deepening my understanding that it was ‘I’ that stood in the road of experiencing the freshness, purity, aliveness and perfection of the actual world and that ‘I’ have to disappear in order for the actual world to be permanently apparent. This included the understanding that ‘I’ am made of nothing but a bundle of instincts, beliefs, imaginations, feelings and social conditioning – the Human Condition. From that understanding it was obvious that fear was ‘par for the course’ – as I wrote to Irene: ‘Fear in the face of impending death is what potatoes are for a potato-soup, its very ingredients. There is no soup without potatoes, there is no death without fear.’ The important thing about fear is not to object to it. Now, that is easier said than done – nobody wants to feel fear. Yet the very act of objecting to fear makes it bigger and therefore makes it impossible to look at the underlying issue. Seeing fear as part of the Human Condition, the disease that everyone is inflicted with, helped to reduce my objection. My allies were my understanding and my intent. So whenever fear arose I focused on my intent to determine the direction of my goal – freedom and peace-on-earth – and then I would go ahead with the investigation into the underlying causes of that particular fear. It was always good to first sort out the facts from the feelings, to look at the situation and make sure that there was no actual physical danger. That made it clear that the remainder of the fear was psychological, i.e. fear of losing my friends, my work, my respectability, losing the ground I was standing on, not wanting to change, not wanting to ‘die’. A quote from Richard really helped me through many fearful and terrifying situations: Richard: ‘... a fact is actual. One cannot argue about a fact as one can about a belief or a truth ... one can only deny a fact and pretend that it is not there. […] Then the question to ask is: ‘Why depression? Because when I see the fact of something ... the fact sets me free of choice. [...] When I see clearly ... then I can proceed ... for then there is action. Seeing the fact – which is seeing without choice – then there is action ... and this action is not of ‘my’ doing.’ (Richard, List B, No. 23a, 12 October 1998). The final fact was: if I wanted to be free, then ‘I’ have to disappear, self-immolate. What is the point of complaining about this fact? What is the point of postponing the journey because of fear? Fear is the ‘normal’, instinctual reaction of my ‘self’, it is ‘par for the course’. I don’t have to let fear stop me from reaching my goal. Of course, it takes a good deal of bloody-mindedness and stubborn persistence, after all, it is quite a pioneering job we are doing here. Of course, it took ‘her’ another 10 years before ‘she’ disappeared but it certainly eased fear and anxiety a lot. (Actualism, Vineeto, Actual Freedom List, No. 6, 12.3.1999). FELIX: Now that I’m starting to acknowledge these deep, murky feelings 1. They are becoming much easier to deal with (as I’m not fighting them) and it is hugely encouraging when I do get back to feeling good 2. They are providing more impetus for becoming free (oh – this is the human condition → I’m in it just like everybody else → and it is indeed terrible and tragic → I need to do something about this). VINEETO: That is truly wonderful. Cheers Vineeto December 24 2024 FELIX: Hey Vineeto, always appreciate your very attentive readings of our experiences. I will read it again tomorrow with fresh eyes. There are a few things I will reply on later. One thing I wanted to convey now though. The kinds of topics that are captivating me are starting to change – today it started with fear and anxiety and existential angst as I wrote about. Later this afternoon, it turned to death and Richard’s writings on the topic. Namely, this exchange: Frequently Asked Questions – How to End Fear? It’s about ending fear, and death. Reading this changed my view on what I am doing – where I typically think of the actualism method in a very stepwise, logical way, the discussion around death changed that. It’s like I could see deeper, and truly see the core of fear. The real me that is not allowing enjoyment in a deep sense. The fear that is at the basis of everything as Richard puts it. Rather than put me into depression, this text did the opposite. It’s as if I could come close to death, come right up to it – each moment again – and much more easily sidestepping my usual way of being (which often seems hopelessly/ relentlessly/ irreversibly negative in feeling tone). It was like “oh of course I need to actually be peace-on-earth”. VINEETO: Hi Felix, Yes, this is what feeling being ‘Vineeto’ saw as well when ‘she’ wrote: ‘Vineeto’: “I wrote to Irene: ‘Fear in the face of impending death is what potatoes are for a potato-soup, its very ingredients. There is no soup without potatoes, there is no death without fear.’ […] The final fact was: if I wanted to be free, then ‘I’ have to disappear, self-immolate. What is the point of complaining about this fact? What is the point of postponing the journey because of fear? Fear is the ‘normal’, instinctual reaction of my ‘self’, it is ‘par for the course’. I don’t have to let fear stop me from reaching my goal.” (Actualism, Vineeto, Actual Freedom List, No. 6, 12.3.1999). FELIX: Some moments later I looked up to the sky. and the stars were out, but I didn’t see a pretty sky. I came to my senses and saw deeply into the universe (my nature as a feeling being was completely bypassed in this moment) … It occurred over a very brief time frame but its significance was immense, a direct experience of the universe that completely eradicated my own significance. (Things normalised later as I met up with someone, but even then my usual angsty depressed lens was gone. Everyone looked so equal and very fresh, whereas usually I’m endlessly comparing myself and everyone. There was much less distinction between everything but everything was amazing on some level. And it was like I wasn’t holding stuff any more like I usually do, a lot of emotional weight was gone.) I have so many hot tears in my eyes as I write this – I’m guessing that in the form of memory this experience is being filtered through ‘me’ and I’m reacting accordingly. It’s because the actual world is more than a feeling being could ever imagine, and I am experiencing huge emotions of empathy (usually by default I tend not to be a majorly empathetic or emotionally self-indulgent person) as a result of processing its significance for “me” and for humanity. That it really is as wondrous as promised. I can see that what I’ve been doing is pulling actualism into “me”, dragging it down into the human condition, rather than making my way into the actual world. VINEETO: This was a wonderful pure consciousness experience. However, when you first report that “things normalised” and then experienced “hot tears” of “huge emotions of empathy”, you had not fully realized what happened. Hence you allowed what could have been an immense appreciation, disperse into “huge emotions” of ‘good feelings’ and thus wasted an opportunity to channel the outcome of the “immense, a direct experience of the universe” into felicitous feelings and immense appreciation. I am telling you so that you may be aware next time when an exceptional opportunity occurs. FELIX: I see the vague image of an unimaginable and amazing direct route, that looks somehow viable. Not sure exactly how of course; but my naïveté is busted open enough to think in bold terms. I wanted to ask, did a time come when you realised you could take such a route? Or was being out-from-control a prerequisite for you. Sorry if it’s covered extensively already, you could also link a relevant section to me if it’s easier. VINEETO: There was no realization for ‘Vineeto’ that ‘she’ “could take such a route” as it didn’t exist at the time. It was opened by Richard and Peter on December 30, 2009, a day before Peter became actually free. FELIX: To put it this way, it’s as if I’ve been studying the theory of the driving test for years but not had a car. Now it’s as if I have a car, and there is road – and I’ve realised that actually driving on this road is going to be completely different to what I imagined when I was theorising. Like an inexperienced driver, I’m both excited and perhaps a bit daunted – there is fear but there is a lot of excitement as well. Does this resonate at all? Of course it’s weird for me to write everything I’m writing because I have no idea what the territory is in a concrete sense, and could not possibly claim any confidence that I know what’s required to self-immolate. It’s all so large and mysterious and unknowable. But nevertheless, there is this underlying intuition that I could abandon theory in favour of some sort of practical boldness. VINEETO: Well, you may have (inadvertently) stumbled upon naiveté, having had to abandon all your theory of actualism by realising that “actually driving” is a different ball-game entirely. So this is your new territory, to allow and experience and explore and delight in being here, locked in this moment as much as possible, feeling naïve and then being naïve because you don’t know what will happen next, and staying in this ‘modus being’ as much as possible. But beware, ‘you’, the cunning feeling being, will endeavour to sabotage living this new territory with appealing to your addiction to pressure, to anxiety and achievement and whatever other trick you have already exposed. I wish you naïve success and ongoing enjoyment and appreciation. Anything less is ‘sudorific’. FELIX: By the way, when I call the actualism method “theory” – I know it’s a practical method but I’m trying to convey that the direct experience is so much further beyond what is imaginable as a feeling being when applying the method in daily life (or at least it was for me). I’m wondering, in other words, can I leap for that beyond? Or is it better I try to clean myself up more and more first. Maybe applying the method will be easier now, and perhaps align closer to direct experience – I’ll have to see! VINEETO: I understand you completely – theory and actual living it are two different things. You have not even recognized that you have already leapt “for that beyond”, your theory is lagging behind, lol. Remember, there is only now, only this moment is actual. Live as much as possible “locked into” this moment as described by Peter, Kuba and Richard – ‘Peter’: So, I find myself sitting on a cusp – irrevocably locked into the world as-it-is, with people as-they-are, and perpetually locked into this moment with no ‘other place’ to escape to and no ‘other time’ to escape to. Experiencing that the only impediment to perfection and purity is ‘me’ – ‘who’ I think and feel I am – whatever is selfishly going on in my head and heart and that is often very weird, very strange. But, then again, this is a very weird thing to do – to re-wire one’s brain to the point of self-extinction. Something has to give in this tension and it is bound to be ‘me’. It seems to me that one can make sense of the Human Condition such that one can be virtually free of it but ‘making sense’ then has to be abandoned for direct sensate experiencing. [Emphasis added]. (Actualism, Peter, Actual Freedom List, No. 13a, 31.1.1999). Kuba: It seems the freeing aspect of actual time is the fact that this body is locked securely in it, as it is always this moment it is impossible to be anywhere but here now. As it is always this moment there is no distance at all which needs to be bridged between *now* and *then*. Richard: Sensuousness is the wondrous awareness of the marvel of being here now at this moment in time and this place in space – which awareness is combined with the fascination of contemplating that this moment is one’s only moment of being alive – and one is never alive at any other time than now. And, wherever one is ... now ... one is always here ... now ... even if one starts walking over to ‘there’ ... now ... along the way to ‘there’ ... now ... one is always here ... now ... and when one arrives ‘there’ ... now ... it too is here ... now. (Richard’s Journal, Appendix Five). FELIX: I hope what I’ve written has some cogency. It’s weird to write about I’m surprised I was able to communicate something at all here haha. VINEETO: No worries, it is all very clear. Perhaps you can catch the naiveté-virus too. Cheers Vineeto December 26 2024 FELIX: Hey Vineeto It’s funny because my message was about taking a direct route and avoiding a clean up. VINEETO: Hi Felix, Ha, I wouldn’t recommend it – you have a habit of changing any task you set yourself into a sudorific enterprise. First get this habit of doing so completely out of your system with an ongoing affective attentiveness and focus on enjoyment and appreciation. FELIX: But ever since that PCE I have been doing nothing but clean up and it’s fantastic. VINEETO: Excellent. FELIX: I can’t make declaratory statements about exactly what’s happening, but I am in a totally new phase of discovering freedom. VINEETO: Ha, you can’t? You just did, and continue to do so too. FELIX: I actually think this is paving the way for virtual freedom – I seem to be successfully eliminating anxiety, which at root is what has held myself and my identity in place so punitively all these years. It’s quite amazing. When I read about Richard eliminating anger some years ago, I didn’t see how he did it. And so I didn’t do anything similar. VINEETO: First, Richard said after the event he described full-blow anger was gone. Second, anger and fear are different. Fear, the one which arises when one fully recognizes that ‘I’ am nothing but a contingent ‘being’, is an existential fear, you can’t eliminate that just like that. It only goes when you self-immolate in your entirety. Anxiety, which is not of the same existential nature, is comparatively easy to handle, once you have recognized and dealt with the habit of suppressing and running away from your feelings. You seem to have successfully worked yourself out of the ‘state of anxiety’ accompanied by painful physical symptoms so now all the different forms of anxiety are ready to be picked and disinclined whenever you become aware of them interfering with your enjoyment and appreciation. FELIX: I understand Scout when he says that asking HAIETMOBA seems to have increased anxiety. Of course anything that is not in the direction of happy and harmless is not the method, but I do understand how the identity misappropriates the method and mucks it all up big time. VINEETO: Well I don’t think you read Scout’s reply to me carefully enough – Vineeto: Are you saying that the moment you become aware how you experience yourself, the fact of being aware makes the experience “painful and exhausting”? Or has it been like that all along, and you were refusing to/afraid to acknowledge it? Scout: The latter, but lending it attention makes the pain feel more acute than numbing it (even though I remain low-grade agitated while numbing too). I’ve been trying to work on not fighting it, it’s just hard bc if I don’t it feels kind of overwhelming. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Scout, 24 December 2024). You see he recognized that the feelings where there before and becoming aware of them “makes the pain feel more acute than numbing it.” Which means it is not as you say “that asking HAIETMOBA seems to have increased anxiety” – so stop spreading discouraging rumours about the actualism method, just because you interpreted your own experience with the actualism method this way. I still think that Scout’s experience is the same that yours was – the actualism method makes you aware of what is already there. And from false interpretation or sloppy observation arises resentment, and another obstacle to feeling good is added. FELIX: Reading what you recently wrote about control really helped – reinforcing that it’s not my fault if I get triggered and I don’t have to stamp it out like a fire or something haha. This “allowance” of what is, is key to freedom I think. VINEETO: You mean this bit? Vineeto to Scout: So that is an understanding which needs to happen first, at a fundamental level. You are this swirling vortex created by ever-changing instinctual passions and it is not your fault (because everyone is born that way). With this firmly in mind you can stop blaming yourself and you will find that the moment you do that, the feeling itself will diminish (not disappear) but lose some of its strength. The reason is that fighting the feeling you are feeding it. Now when you put this in practice and notice the effect, you can pat yourself on the back that you had your first insight and success. Be a friend to yourself (the only one you are with 24hrs a day). The other benefit of recognizing and accepting that you are your feelings is that you are not a victim, neither a victim of your own feelings nor a victim of other people’s feelings. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Scout, 3 December 2024b). Or perhaps this one? Richard: What I have observed over many years is that a normal person has a propensity to blame – to find fault rather than to find causes – when it comes to dealing with the human condition … if for no other reason than that finding the cause means the end of ‘me’ (or the beginning of the end of ‘me’). Whereas endlessly repeating mea culpa keeps ‘me’ in existence. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 27c, 9 September 2002). FELIX: Another thing that has really helped is understanding the difference between different feeling states and using feeling good as a comparative measure. By that I mean, when feeling good, I look back at previous emotional struggles I had a day or two earlier and ask what it was about. VINEETO: Well, that really is a sign that the “previous emotional struggles” have disappeared out of your system. It’s fascinating how it works, hey? FELIX: It’s starting to really make sense that to feel anxious is so silly – it adds absolutely nothing and only brings its own problems. But it wouldn’t have been enough just to call it silly – it’s the familiarity with feeling good which is the mop that cleans everything up. If feeling anxious was making unwell, which it was, feeling happy and harmless is making me well – and it feels great to feel that happening also. VINEETO: This is excellent – when you can see that being anxious is silly because it makes you unwell, then it is so easy to get back to feeling good. You are back to where you wanted to be, and stay, on November 3 2024 – Felix: Since then, feeling good has been arising very easily – which is all quite simple and delightful. I’m just inviting it more and more, which is as much about staying out of the way and not getting triggered than anything else. [emphasis added]. FELIX: I haven’t been throwing down any gauntlets to myself re self immolation; I’m enjoying the journey of progress so to speak for now. VINEETO: Ha, this is warrior language – do you see your life as a battle against demons and dragons and other antagonists? In fact, against yourself and ‘self’-immolation as a battle to be fought. My, my, you still have a lot to learn lol. Just as well you “haven’t been throwing down any gauntlets”. I had understood that being friends with yourself had appealed to you? Maybe I was wrong. * FELIX: I remember the phrase I referred to. Richard would ask himself if he wants to be “dull and degenerate” ‘VINEETO: Here it is – and Richard didn’t ask “himself”, he said “to ask oneself”, as a ‘wake-up jab’. It is in only one correspondence (then copied into 4 selected correspondences) – no wonder I didn’t remember it – ‘VINEETO’: Richard gave a wonderful description on how to induce a peak-experience: ‘To get out of ‘stuckness’ one gets off one’s backside and does whatever one knows best to activate delight. Delight is what is humanly possible, given sufficient pure intent obtained from the felicity/ innocuity born of the pure consciousness experience, and from the position of delight, one can vitalise one’s joie de vivre by the amazement at the fun of it all ... and then one can – with sufficient abandon – become over-joyed and move into marvelling at being here and doing this business called being alive now. Then one is no longer intuitively making sense of life ... the delicious wonder of it all drives any such instinctive meaning away. Such luscious wonder fosters the innate condition of naiveté – the nourishing of which is essential if fascination in it all is to occur – and the charm of life itself easily engages dedication to peace-on-earth. Then, as one gazes intently at the world about by glancing lightly with sensuously caressing eyes, out of the corner of one’s eye comes – sweetly – the magical fairy-tale-like paradise that this verdant earth actually is ... and one is the experiencing of what is happening. But refrain from possessing it and making it your own ... or else ‘twill vanish as softly as it appeared. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, Alan, 13 December 1998). RESPONDENT: I have a bit of trouble summoning up delight (as Richard suggests), as it seems imaginary, as opposed to the release that comes with facing issues. That is still under consideration though. RICHARD: The first sentence of above paragraph is specifically designed to get one out of ‘stuckness’ ... it is not intended as an on-going way of living life. It is a short, sharp shock of attention – a ‘kick-start’ in the jargon – to counteract the ‘I didn’t ask to be born’ resentment that caused the stuckness in the first place. Another ‘wake-up jab’ (which makes use of any remnant of pride) is to ask oneself: ‘I have two choices right now: being happy and harmless or being dull and degenerate ... which way do I sensibly choose to spend this never-to-be-repeated precious moment of living so that I can honestly call myself a mature adult?’ A happy and harmless person has a much better chance of precipitating a PCE ... which is the essential pre-requisite for an actual freedom (otherwise this is all theory). It goes without saying, surely, that a grumpy person locks themselves out of being here ... now. For a full and comprehensive explication of what this succinct paragraph conveys you may care to access the article: ‘Attentiveness and Sensuousness and Apperceptiveness’ on my Web Page. [emphases added]. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 3, 16 February 1999). Cheers Vineeto December 31 2024 FELIX: There is a great deal of fun and freedom to it. And a wow factor. These experiences have a highly dynamic quality, there is a sense of movement – it’s me moving through life as if moving effortlessly and magically. It isn’t a static experience of staring at a wall waiting for something to happen. At times though that stillness does pop up momentarily; and it is almost scary when it does – a very momentary pristine perfection shines through. A “tintling” that fills the eyes and replaces egoic experience with a wonder. All the world as it’s usually known is gone – nothing is not magical. These experiences are having a profound effect on me generally. I’m excited, thrilled, can’t wait to see what will happen, totally engaged. […] I have to report the other side of the coin; the falling back into me, my problems, the heaviness of life. VINEETO: Hi Felix, Just a short reminder that you originally started your intentions with “looking for the triggers”, as in “Looking at the anxiety itself, and what triggered it …” Now these triggers not only refer to what happened to make you feel bad, it also refers to when you get seduced to allow a PCE or excellence experience or simply feeling felicitous and appreciative into the ‘good’ feelings and sometimes huge ‘good’ feelings – gratitude, love, excitement, expectations about future scenarios, day-dreaming, empathy, etc. I personally know from ‘Vineeto’s’ experience how tempting that is, and more difficult to discover because it feels so attractive at first. But it puts you back on the see-saw of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ intense feelings, hence it’s beneficial to include putting ‘good’ feelings on the watch in your ongoing fascinated attention. Remember, having ‘good’ feelings is vastly different to feeling good. I mentioned this before – Vineeto: This was a wonderful pure consciousness experience. However, when you first report that “things normalised” and then experienced “hot tears” of “huge emotions of empathy”, you had not fully realized what happened. Hence you allowed what could have been an immense appreciation, disperse into “huge emotions”of ‘good feelings’ and thus wasted an opportunity to channel the outcome of the “immense, a direct experience of the universe” into felicitous feelings and immense appreciation. I am telling you so that you may be aware next time when an exceptional opportunity occurs. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Felix, 24 December 2024). Let me know if this attention to ‘good’ feelings helps in any way to maintain feeling good (even though it may not be exciting). Cheers Vineeto January 2 2025 FELIX: One is that a couple of night’s ago I was given ketamine. Ketamine is a “dissociative anaesthetic” with analgesic properties that is apparently excellent for PTSD, and the chronic stress condition that I picked up some years ago can be considered to overlap considerably with PTSD according to a psychologist I saw 12 months age. VINEETO: Hi Felix, An interesting report. For some additional information on Ketamine, in case you are not fully acquainted with what has been given to you – “Surgeons, for another example, have known of the emergent consciousness effect for some time ... a less commonly used anaesthesia these days is the dissociative drug ‘ketamine’ because of its OBE and NDE side-effect. There is a wealth of information on the subject ... for example: <snip>” (Richard, List B, No. 28, 11 July 2001) And: (Richard, General Correspondence, Alan2, 10 July 1998) Cheers Vineeto January 4 2025 FELIX (to Jon): I just read this unhinged post. Leaving aside the self-defeating statement at the start regarding how your lost connection to pure intent “sucks”, you then go on to accept being steeped in the human condition. That accurately sets the scene for the very human-condition-exemplifying text that follows, which includes some rambling observations which I was able to partially agree with (though imprecisely delivered and with some missteps in logic). Then you make the point that “anyone (sic) who has any questions at all or wants to make a single point that isn’t 100% validating gets called transphobic.” Which is then followed up with: “Turns out my neighbor is transitioning to being a girl and now goes by a different name. What are the odds? Needless to say, we’re locking the kids in doors and will be moving. Got the rifle out too. Fully loaded by the front door. The boy is cleaning it right now. Can I ask on what basis you bother to participate in this forum at all? If you want to resignedly accept your role the human condition, and you openly admit to wanting to kill people, I’m not understanding your attraction to this forum, nor the fact that this kind of behavior is mutely accepted here. VINEETO: Hi Felix, You wrote a rather non-sensical and highly passionate post yourself – The post you answered was written 2 years ago. The last 2 paragraphs were meant as a spoof, which you took to be deadly serious. You were so emotionally triggered on behalf of tribal loyalty that you unthinkingly showed a fellow actualist the door (“bother to participate in this forum at all”). Based solely on the strength of your own feelings of “justified indignation” you decide that you are ‘right’ and the other is ‘wrong’. Wouldn’t it be far more appropriate to investigate your own passionate trigger of “justified indignation” instead of engaging in a power battle justifying/ defending the cause of your tribal belonging – as in, I am the only person I can actually change? Claudiu recently gave a good example how one can do that – Claudiu: Later in the day I was having a convo with two people and there was a lot of cross-talk and I wasn’t able to get out something that I really wanted to say. I had such a powerful reaction that I was floored and reeled. I got so amazingly annoyed! It was like a deep, burning annoyance. I kept my hands in my pockets and apparently it didn’t show, but this was such a deep annoyance, like it hit at my very core – and over such a trivial thing! It was remarkable though that I was not annoyed at being annoyed, or beating myself up for feeling annoyed… I was allowing the annoyance, letting myself fully feel it, neither expressing nor repressing. And this helped me to see the shape of it, the shape of ‘me’. This remarkably deep and solid-feeling thing, like a rod of annoyance haha. It made it all the more clear that all of me, indeed, has to go! [emphases added]. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Claudiu3, 17 December 2024a). Cheers Vineeto January 5 2025 FELIX: It’s not often I disagree with you Vineeto but on this occasion I do! I think you are rather assuming that I was triggered …. I know I’m a feeling being but it doesn’t mean that just because I say or do anything, it means that I must have been highly triggered. Where is the evidence of feelings of “justified indignation”, other than what is being read into my text (following some logic of “he bothered to write, he made an objection to it, he wrote in a stern manner, he’s a feeling being, → therefore he was triggered”). It certainly wasn’t an LGBT issue either I just don’t think we should have people openly making murder jokes - are we calling even that actualist morality? Also, I don’t see any clear indication that it was a spoof. Unless you mean he wasn’t serious that he would actually kill someone – I did realise that that part wasn’t meant literally! I still think it’s abhorrent to imply that you would kill someone because of their identity on a forum about perpetuating peace-on-earth. As to your other points, I don’t regard someone who makes no apparent effort to be happy/harmless (if not the opposite) to be a “fellow actualist”. Besides which I wasn’t calling for him to be barred or similar, other than personally asking him about it (and openly wondering why this post had been taken completely without issue by anyone). I invited him to check himself, is all. <snip> VINEETO: Hi Felix, If you say so, it must be so … to you that is. But when someone starts their communication with “I just read this unhinged post” – unhinged as in “crazy, demented, disturbed, mad, sick, unbalanced, insane, manic, crazed, and uncontrolled, affected with madness or insanity, or highly disturbed, unstable, or distraught”, then this is the opening to a strong put-down. You say you didn’t “see any clear indication that it was a spoof” and consequently assumed that Jon “would kill someone because of their identity”. This is quite an extreme assessment of anyone. Well, to be so far off the mark, I simply could not see that a careful sensible non-emotionally-tinged message would look like the way it did. To spell it out – the spoof was a fantasy scene what an imaginary US Redneck (a group which Jon dislikes) would do, responding to a trans person in their neighbourhood, hence he called it a “Funny story”. You completely missed the black humour (apparently a category you are not familiar with) and just continued with your prejudiced assumptions, after you determined that Jon is not ‘one of us’, i.e. an actualist (“I don’t regard someone … to be a “fellow actualist”) and therefore won’t deserve friendly or even unbiased consideration. Now you invoke “actualist morality” (“are we calling even that actualist morality?”). The whole sequence is riddled with identity politics, ‘us versus them’, and no regard for a fellow human being to be seen. Don’t you think this topic would deserve closer attention? Instead of presenting yourself as a ‘good actualist’ in contrast to others – isn’t this exactly the label with which you have been whipping yourself in the past years and driven to an almost unbearable emotional state to the point of needing to take a big break from work? And still you maintain this morality of who is a ‘good actualist’ and apply it to yourself and others, even though it has done nothing at all to make you either happy or harmless, to the contrary. Can you not see that this ‘good actualist’ morality/identity is a cunning ploy of your identity demanding that you look good in the eyes of others and your own ideals of yourself, thereby barring the way to become tangibly free from the ‘self’-slavery and stress you have submitted yourself to? When you can really see this, grasp this, understand this, you will drop your ideals like a hot iron – they only make you more stressful, more miserable, a self-whipping fiend to yourself, and morally judgemental towards your fellow human beings who are not good enough actualists. Maybe you were not ‘strongly’ emotionally triggered by your standards, but triggered enough to harshly morally judge the other as “crazy, demented, disturbed”, etc and call on allies to agree with your own gross misunderstanding. So instead of your righteous and self-harming ‘good actualist’ morality/identity you could drop all should’s and ought-to’s, and instead look for a sincere wish to be happy and harmless, for your own sake and the sake of your fellow human beings. But refrain to make it an image, a rule, a command, an identity, else it becomes another jail like the one you have just barely escaped from. Cheers Vineeto January 9 2025 FELIX: Hey Vineeto, There are a few things I could quibble with about the way you interpreted some things I said and the meanings of some words and phrases. I feel like it would be missing the point on my part to do that. Obviously this is all about our individual journeys to becoming happy and harmless and ultimately free of the human condition, and you are using your time to help support that process – so it’s in that spirit that I’ve thought about what you said overall and how I could use it positively. […] Underneath all of that, I realise I spend a lot of my time feeling quite quite anxious. […] So I’m going to be cutting all the trappings around actualist identity and going back to just asking how I feel in the most basic sense, and seeing if I can allow myself to feel good. But I’ll also be going back to living a normal life and not being quite so fervent about actualism as it seems to take me in the wrong direction. VINEETO: Hi Felix, Thank you for your reply. It’s a good idea to “cutting all the trappings” and enjoy and appreciate as much as you can. Whenever you are feeling anxious, ask yourself each time, is it worthwhile, whatever you are anxious about. Mostly you’ll find it is not, and often it may only be a persistent habit. Remember, it feels good to feel good. All the best Cheers Vineeto January 18 2025 FELIX: I have been applying the method in the most basic way possible. Truly back to basics. It’s just about as feeling good as much as possible atm. (…) Feeling good is happening more though and indeed feels “not of my doing”, it has a beneficiary quality to it and my thoughts and approach (and visual perception) totally changes when there. Sometimes it verges on magical or I can feel that the actual is there. It’s only from feeling good that it happens. It’s amazing how easy things become at that point. It feels very healthy and really good, like saying “bye bye problems” haha. The burnout state on the other hand is like having my hand on a hot stove. It’s hard to think clearly in it. It promotes very short term and negative thinking and there is a generalised anxiety to it. From there, “everything is wrong” but there is no sense to it and no clear way to fix things. It feels as if there were only problems; infinite problems; and that my life consists of a painstaking, desperate and totally failed attempt to overcome these obstacles. I can feel a literal “burn” like my whole nervous system is totally tense. If I make it sound very binary it is quite like that atm. I am either in one state or the other usually. Another thing I’m realising has caused a lot of undue stress is the way I’m living life generally. I put myself in a situation where I fully committed to trying to become free, whilst not giving myself anything to “hold on to” in the real world - the things that ordinarily would help people feel good or not feel anxiety. For example; having a stable place to live, steady relationships, a normal steady job etc etc. I’ve got some bad habits since becoming an actualist of running from responsibilities, trying to avoid problems and stress, procrastinating etc which are silly and it creates more problems than it fixes. So I’m also looking at some of those practical things. VINEETO: Hi Felix, It is great to hear that “feeling good is happening more” even though it alternates with burn-out states. Perhaps what you are realising at present, that “the way I’m living life generally” “has caused a lot of undue stress”, can now help you to reduce or at least diminish those burn-out times. It seems to be a long-standing habit, almost imprinted, so it will need determined and persistent observation to slowly change the way you are “living life generally” to a less stressful modus operandi. Is perhaps the need to be the best in everything you do the reason for the stressful way to live life? If so, do you have a way to look at that need, to check if it is necessary to maintain it? After all, it is from where you acquire social acceptance, recognition and praise. But … is it worth the prize? I leave it to you to mull it over, perhaps it helps. FELIX: Cutting out a lot of the actualist identity stuff has helped – it’s made me a beginner again but that’s also a blessing as real change is happening. VINEETO: That’s a great step towards a less stressful approach to actualism and you are already reaping the rewards. So much better than collecting imaginary ‘medals’ in a system that only turned out to be spanners in the works. The additional benefit is that as “a beginner” you are curious and eager to discover new ways of enjoying being alive in a naïve way. Cheers Vineeto January 18 2025 FELIX: Hey Vineeto, I think there is some huge blockage going on here. I’m investigating this deeply atm. The moment to moment awareness of being alive has never been the problem, in the sense that I am aware a lot of the time. However I’m all the time feeling this tightness, like a physical pain (psychosomatic of course) – some kind of knot of emotional pain which I’m all the time avoiding. Through awareness the last couple of days I am feeling deeper into this knot. I am feeling more resentment than I knew I had there (perhaps my ambition to feel good and succeed in that way led to a denial of pain). VINEETO: Hi Felix, Thank you for your explicit reply. My guess is that this resentment /these resentments would be the layer to start with. Whatever else is going on, as long as you resent the fact that this is where you are at, the pain/tightness is multiplied by resenting it. So I would say, peel the onion from the outer-most layer and see if you can get to a point where you accept that this is how things are at the moment. See if that makes you feel lighter, better, more likeable and more liking to be alive. FELIX: Another factor is some traumatic stuff that happened – both as a kid and then a few years ago which is when the burnout arose. I think it caused me to shut down emotionally. I saw a therapist once about a year ago and she said I had a tendency to not be empathetic about what I was feeling, almost like I was staying purely in an intellectual zone. I spoke with one of the basically actually free guys recently and they said they thought I was “downplaying” what I was feeling. So it’s like this sense of being shutdown, of not being open or delicate, of having a very hard outer shell – almost impenetrable. All the while this sense of disconnection has made it very hard to make sensible life choices or even relate in a normal human way to other people. Like having no intuition for what’s good or right, somewhat like being “off kilter”, or misfiring/ malfunctioning (the recent event with that post from 2 years ago being an example of that). And though aware “all the time”, my awareness does not take me into this pain. I avoid and distract all the time. Like feeling what there is to feel down there will somehow ruin me or something. This is totally subconscious, because of course as an actualist I’ve wanted to feel what I’m feeling etc and do all the right stuff. But it’s been a cunning cat or mouse game where I’m always trying but not succeeding, wanting to feel good whilst being dragged in the opposite direction. There’s been more and more triggers lately where I’ve seen a huge internal storm raging under the surface. It doesn’t get expressed outwardly at all, and again it’s like it’s got a lid on it. Like I’m not “allowed” to feel or express what I’m feeling. It’s often not appropriate to the situation. Not sure if this comes from when I was a kid … I was pretty sensitive but would always get harshly punished for what I was feeling. VINEETO: I won’t comment on those yet, because it is best to take one thing at a time. FELIX: But now it’s like I can’t run any longer – clearly what I’m doing isn’t working. I think I need to get close to what this is. At first it’s like there is nothing there, except that kind of physical knot. But the more awareness I apply (with some sense of friendliness or empathy) the more it grows. I’ve found myself starting to tear up a bit and stuff like that when I do it and it does feel good, like the release of a pressure valve. It’s like I need to allow myself to truly feel. I’m cut off from what’s there … the more I am friendly with myself and caring the more these feelings are seeming to open up. VINEETO: It is a sensible approach, be gentle, be friendly and be aware that any of this is neither your fault nor your failure. It is the human condition in your particular situation and you are now ready – because “I can’t run any longer” – to tackle the uppermost layer of that “knot”. It’s time to end the fight against yourself. Cheers Vineeto January 20 2025 FELIX: Thanks for your reply Vineeto – I appreciate it must be hard to track the inner workings of a feeling being and what’s happening but I appreciate your efforts to understand and help. I have actually been finding this knot thing incredibly helpful. I mean it’s painful/ has the essence of suffering but being ”stuck” in this way is inviting progress as I deeply ask myself what it’s all about. I think my description of going back to being a beginner may create the impression I have 600 layers of unexplored identity layers. Whereas I don’t think that’s the case. As I feel throughout the day I’m mostly always aware of what I’m feeling. It might be anxiety, it might be boredom. The problem is that the ”pain” point that these feelings create is not being relieved, but rather coalescing into a sum of its parts – a ”pain” identity of feeling like I’m always carrying this heavy weight around or have my hand in a hot plate. I’ve been going deeper and deeper into this. Why am I always feeling some version of bad? What would it take me to not feel this way? VINEETO: Hi Felix, As a reminder only, you may remember this quote – in order for the actualism method to work, it is important that you fully grasped that ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’ as contrasted to ‘I’ have feelings (which I don’t like). Here is how No. 60 described it – RESPONDENT: ‘It has taken me a hell of a long time to understand the difference between having feelings and being those feelings. Because I have not clearly understood this, I’ve never quite got the hang of paying attention to feelings without praise or blame, and without notions of innocence and culpability, right and wrong, etc getting in the way. This makes things very interesting. The moment I regard my ‘self’ as ‘having’ a feeling, I’m split down the middle and there’s a secondary reaction on the part of the social identity (an urge to “do something” about the feeling, which in turn evokes more feelings, and so on). Conversely, if I recognise that I am the feeling, it most often dissolves into thin air – and usually pretty quickly too. This is great. It’s especially helpful with regard to anger and frustration which have been two of my biggest hurdles to date. Previously, when I caught myself being angry, annoyed or frustrated, identifying and paying attention to this feeling would NOT cause it to disappear. On the contrary, the feeling and the awareness of myself as ‘having’ it would sometimes become like a microphone and amplifier locked into a screaming feedback loop. I’m really pleased that this is no longer happening. It seems almost too easy’. [emphasis in original]. (Thursday 28/10/2004 6:55 PM AEST) RICHARD: And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 60g, 30 October 2005a). Hence my suggestion to check out any resentment, which would prevent you fully acknowledging and accepting that you are the feeling you are experiencing. When you stop objecting to feeling the way you feel and when you fully experience that you are the feeling, it is “almost too easy” to change from feeling bad to feeling felicitous because it is so obvious that feeling happy feels so much better than feeling bad. The above quote is also an important reminder for anyone who has practiced any form of meditation where one creates a ‘watcher’ to observe one’s thoughts come and go. This creates an artificial, additional distance between ‘me’ and ‘my’ feelings which prevent the actualism method from working as intended. However, once one grasps and fully accepts that ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings, ‘I’ am the instinctual passions, then ‘I’ have a choice to be whichever feeling I prefer to be. Of course, the triggers still need to be investigates once feeling good in order for them to not be triggered again and again. FELIX: This has been taking me into naïveté. Its effect is amazing … this is the path forward I think. As an identity, I’ve given myself nowhere to go so to speak – all the usual doors to escape are locked because I know that any of the usual human pathways I could take are mere repetitions of the same old cycles, that they wont work, that nothing will ever be as “I” want it. I’ve tried to dominate myself, to dominate life – and that has “brought me to my knees in a sense” – it’s not going to ever happen like that. All I know each moment again is that I want to feel good, that I don’t want to feel bad, and naïveté is helping me find this … it’s not possible to define what it is. But it’s what is manifest when I am naive. So indeed, I’ve been applying “emergency naïveté” so to speak haha. Having no other option, I have had to discover naïveté for myself – the hard way, and against my natural inclinations which are anything but that. VINEETO: That is almost funny, “against my natural inclinations”, and yet it is quite common that the natural naiveté of early childhood is so deeply buried that one often has to come to a point of feeling very foolish to have failed in order to rediscover one’s naiveté. It is very fortunate that you did. It is indeed opening doors which had seemed closed. FELIX: It’s continuing now and I’m seeing things so differently. It’s not a question of my beliefs in this moment or that about this or that topic. It’s more like my whole belief in myself, and where I am. It’s like I change to seeing with a universal lens, not a self-centric/ maligned egocentric one. On the other side of me and my problems there is this total wonder, and a sense of being anywhere/when. So indeed all these problems I’ve described – the identity making to impossible, feeling trapped, doing everything right but everything being wrong … it seems to be my way into naïveté. Stuff is opening up. I see a way forward, and an open door. VINEETO: Be careful not making this newly discovered naiveté into a new philosophy or system or imaginary identity, else it becomes a restricting cage to lock you in again. ‘Me’, the identity, is very inventive at devising cunning scenarios to keep ‘you’ in place. Nourish the wonder, the amazement, the appreciation how wondrous and wonderful the world is when you see it afresh, each moment with eyes of simplicity, naiveté – guileless, unsophisticated, artless, ingenuous and open to a new experience each moment again. Cheers Vineeto June 2 2025 FELIX: When I look at my years of difficulty with this method, I see I was getting stuck in quite extreme anxiety most of the time when we’re talking about applying the method, or trying to have PCEs and stuff like that. I didn’t know what to do when I hit those barriers which I perceived as threatening. Feeling good seemed a literal impossibility no matter how hard I tried. Now it’s totally different, anxiety or emotional pain or insecurity are just like a setting on the washing machine – not something to lean into or take seriously at all (other than to feel it fully and sincerely investigate). Don’t get me wrong, they are still powerful emotions – it’s just that I have a game plan when they take place now, one that doesn’t involve dissociation/ escape/ despair/ self-castigation/ further anxiety. VINEETO: Hi Felix, Welcome back. You seemed to have used your time very successful, after a lot of trial and error, to finally succeed in finding “a game plan” which “doesn’t involve dissociation/ escape/ despair/ self-castigation/ further anxiety.” This in itself is quite remarkable, especially to acknowledge, then recognize and decline dissociation and further to decline the follow-up above listed feelings as well. Your last sentence confirms that it’s really working and it’s wonderful to read – FELIX: It’s crazy how when feeling good or beyond, this moment really is enough, and not something at all to be wasted. VINEETO: Cheers Vineeto June 2 2025 FELIX: Having done away with dissociation, I’m experiencing a lot more surges of big feelings. I think these feelings have been there underneath the whole time, but I was running from them. I really got stuck. On one hand, I wanted to succeed, be a great actualist, become actually free etc. On the other hand, the strategies I was employing were anything but about openly feeling. I was trying to override what I was feeling, to push past it and ignore it (on the way to success, I thought), I was distracting myself and running. Sometimes I was trying to solve the feelings with real world solutions (i.e. “I need more friends”, “I’m not occupying myself enough”, “I need to do X to feel happy”). Other times I was distracting and running. Escapism and pleasure seeming so as to not have to deal with negative emotions. VINEETO: Hi Felix, At this point it might be helpful to remember that human beings are primed to automatically push negative, unpleasant feelings away. The trouble is that the energy to push them away is adding to the affective strength of the feeling, i.e. makes it worse. It helps to pay attention to this automatic response and consciously decline rejecting/ pushing away the feeling and just let it be. You will see that this instantly diminishes the strength of the feeling and allow you to get to a reasonable level of feeling good. Then, and only then, you can have a look at the trigger and sort it out so that the same reaction doesn’t happen again next time in a similar situation. As you said “this moment really is … not something at all to be wasted”. FELIX: Another one was to blame myself. “I’m a terrible person”, “I don’t care about anyone”, “my neurotransmitters are messed up”. VINEETO: I know from ‘Vineeto’s’ experience, this is really a very persistent habit and well worthwhile extricating yourself from this addiction to blame yourself, especially because it is held in high esteem by a large part of society. Be a rebel in this regard and pat yourself on the back each time you discover and decline such a habitual self-castigation. FELIX: I really put myself in a difficult situation, caught between the real world and the actual world and not flourishing in either. VINEETO: Just to be accurate, you are not “caught between the real world and the actual world” but rather caught between your old ways and the new way of feeling good come what may. FELIX: Now I can feel what’s underneath without it being mediated by, anything really – even social identity. The feelings are very strong, at times. Very strong fear, for example. At other times, strong sorrow. VINEETO: Weirdly, even though these feelings are by no means pleasant or easy to feel, it seems it’s a step in the right direction to be feeling in such an unfiltered way. At the same time, when these feelings come up my intent is to get back to feeling good – I do not purposely wallow in feelings of anxiety or whatever. Sometimes I think of Geoffrey saying to himself as a feeling being, “just chill dude”. Geoffrey is spot on – it’s a more succinct way of expressing what I said above regarding not feeding the feeling by objecting to it. FELIX: That being said, some of these feelings are very sticky. When fear takes over, those feelings push for some kind of action. But other than further anxiety, there isn’t actually much to do but to sit it out (and aim to “tap dance” on top of it – not taking it too seriously lest it ends up in a panic attack). Fear is powerful – it can easily make me feel like everything I am doing must be wrong. When this happens I am careful not to catastrophise further by going down the route of feeling it’s my fault or worrying about if I never find the actual world etc. It can help to remind myself at these times that the actual world does exist, that I can trust Vineeto and the other actually free people who have done it, and that I am finding my way through the psychic maze and will come out the other side at some point. I suspect that some of the strong feelings have something to do with control – I’m fighting for my life at times haha. The quotes from Vineeto in Kuba’s diary about naïveté are inspiring. I’ve already proved that a strategic or sudorific or controlled or anxious approach doesn’t work, so I’m interested to see if I can let go… VINEETO: Before you move on to your next aim, remember that when you fully, i.e. experientially, grasp that ‘I’ am my feelings in lieu of having feelings then you can consciously choose which feeling you rather be, which is, of course, being felicitous and harmless. As a reminder, here is No. 60’s account how miraculously this worked for him at some point which I posted on 20 January this year (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Felix, 20 January 2025) – Respondent: ‘It has taken me a hell of a long time to understand the difference between having feelings and being those feelings. Because I have not clearly understood this, I’ve never quite got the hang of paying attention to feelings without praise or blame, and without notions of innocence and culpability, right and wrong, etc getting in the way. This makes things very interesting. The moment I regard my ‘self’ as ‘having’ a feeling, I’m split down the middle and there’s a secondary reaction on the part of the social identity (an urge to “do something” about the feeling, which in turn evokes more feelings, and so on). Conversely, if I recognise that I am the feeling, it most often dissolves into thin air – and usually pretty quickly too. This is great. It’s especially helpful with regard to anger and frustration which have been two of my biggest hurdles to date. Previously, when I caught myself being angry, annoyed or frustrated, identifying and paying attention to this feeling would NOT cause it to disappear. On the contrary, the feeling and the awareness of myself as ‘having’ it would sometimes become like a microphone and amplifier locked into a screaming feedback loop. I’m really pleased that this is no longer happening. It seems almost too easy’. [emphasis in original]. (Thursday 28/10/2004 6:55 PM AEST) Richard: And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 60g, 30 October 2005a). I wish you a lot of fun and success. Cheers Vineeto June 3 2025 FELIX: Hi Vineeto, It’s great to hear from you. I know I tend to disappear sometimes, mainly because I want to make sure I’m making progress and not kidding myself diary entries etc. Thanks for the welcome back. The messages and words in recent days on here have been amazing. I’m not sure if it was always like that and I just wasn’t “open” to it, but there seems to be a marvellous energy happening. People seem to be having fresh insights, and it’s great to read of Claudiu’s exciting trip to see Geoffrey. VINEETO: Hi Felix, You are welcome and I do understand that you disappear from time to time to work things out for yourself. I am delighted that the people on the forum are doing very well indeed. * VINEETO: You seemed to have used your time very successful, after a lot of trial and error, to finally succeed in finding “a game plan” which “doesn’t involve dissociation/ escape/ despair/ self-castigation/ further anxiety.” FELIX: Regarding this – indeed it’s incredible the degree to which one can get lost. For me, I have always been such a diehard actualist – but this seems to be a part of my identity itself rather than something sincere… the irony of being an intense/ obsessed actualist who most of the time was feeling driven and stressed rather than good. Indeed I am still somewhat between how I used to be, and a new change that I feel is coming. It’s remarkable to experience this change towards feeling good more often happen. My health is also improving generally. VINEETO: Indeed, this not only seems, but is in fact, “part of my identity itself rather than something sincere… the irony of being an intense/ obsessed actualist who most of the time was feeling driven and stressed rather than good”. It would be very beneficial if you renamed/ relabelled this part of your identity rather than giving it the self-confusing label of ‘actualist’, thus justifying the self-harming habit of blaming yourself, amongst other misconceptions. Recognizing the feeling of intensity and being obsessed should be enough to alert you that you wandered off the wide and wondrous path whenever the “intense/ obsessed” old Felix appears on the scene, makes you feel bad (competition, having to prove something, putting yourself down) and actively works against the aim of actualism. Therefore it is not only perfectly safe to decline obeying the demands of ‘old Felix’ (which are the commands taken on as a necessary survival strategy) but it is imperative to decline this (now redundant and harmful) habit each and every time it rears its ugly head – Richard: It is important to comprehend that the aim, the goal, of actualism practice is the enjoyment and appreciation of being alive right now – at this very moment of being alive and not indefinitely postponed off into some indeterminate future – via the minimisation of both the malicious/ sorrowful feelings (the ‘bad’ feelings) and their antidotal loving/ compassionate feelings (the ‘good’ feelings) in concert with the maximisation of the felicitous/ innocuous feelings, and how that (affective) enjoyment and appreciation *is* the very actualist awareness in action (as distinct from the buddhistic mindfulness, for instance, which requires cognitive engagement). What this means in effect is that, because one cannot help but be aware, each moment again, of even the slightest diminution of that experiential awareness (of that very enjoyment and appreciation of *feeling* as felicitous/ innocuous as is humanly possible) via *feeling* it diminish, cognitive attentiveness can be freely applied to whatever one is engaged in doing, in one’s moment-to-moment daily life, be it earning a living, reading/ watching various media, studying for examinations, and so on, and so forth. (Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive) Perhaps upon carefully reading what the aim of an actualist is you will recognize that your phantom “actualist”, the “intense/ obsessed” Felix is the very creation of ‘you’, the identity, endeavouring to survive another day and prevent you from freeing yourself from the shackles of real-world moralistic/ ethical beliefs and behaviour. In actualism there is no need to be intense or obsessed because your motivation is derived from the sincere intent to imitate the actual (as experienced in the PCE). FELIX: That being said, this intense Felix does come back. Today was an example of that (my post about fear) where I was sitting on my hands, and intending to feel good – but my lived experience was actually a huge amount of anxiety and fear. And what you say about “splitting” oneself is very apt, because at that point I’m becoming anxious that I’m feeling anxious – as well as the notions I mentioned of fears that I’ll never make it, that I’m not cut out for actualism, or that I’m wired “wrong”. VINEETO: Here is what I wrote to Chrono only yesterday – Vineeto: ... Most likely you have, like most feeling beings, been brought up to put yourself down, blame yourself first when something unexpected happens and then “splitting myself instead”. It is vital to recognize such habitual reaction and decline it each time it inveigles itself again. Nothing which affective attentiveness cannot fix when replaced with a more fortuitous and fruitful habit of patting yourself on the back for noticing it each time you catch it (a habit is best replaced with something better when you want to extract yourself from a destructive habit). [Emphasis added]. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Chrono, 2 June 2025). When you experience an intense ‘bad’ or ‘good’ feeling, first stop the automatic reaction of fighting the feeling as soon as you become aware. The rejection of the feeling adds to the affective energy of the feeling itself. By becoming aware of this automatic rejection the feeling of anger or fear will diminish in intensity instantly. Also, as soon as possible, stop putting yourself down – you are doing something entirely new to human consciousness (and against all intuition to boot) and this is a challenging and exciting enterprise. One way of fighting the feeling is to blame yourself. It’s not so much that you are “not cut out for actualism” or that “I’m wired ‘wrong’” but that you need to ween yourself off from ineffective and harmful habits, which you call “actualism” to additionally confuse yourself. FELIX: So this driven/ controlled way of getting actualism to work, just clearly doesn’t work. It’s very self defeating because one feels one is trying one’s absolute hardest, and is only getting psycho-emotionally punished in a way. Right now I’m feeling good and this anxiety is very hard to imagine – I can say feeling good is easy haha. But I know at the time it was not the case at all, it was distressing and I was up against a wall. I think throughout my time practising actualism I have had a fair whack of that sort of thing. VINEETO: It is vital to know that you cannot force/ will yourself to feel good by “intending to feel good”. That’s what I conveyed in my post to you yesterday with the quote from No. 60 starting with “It has taken me a hell of a long time …” (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Felix, 2 June 2025a). FELIX: I am really keen to apply the approach you suggested of not objecting to these feelings when they come up. The feelings feel so wrong, to the point of making me feel physically ill/ unhealthy, but I think it’s also because I am pushing them away from the moment I feel it (usually from the moment I wake up into it) and think “this feels wrong/bad”. It creates that kind of animal stampede effect, of trying to flee one’s own body. In the past to escape the stress I would pursue distraction/escapism which is where my addiction issues were happening. VINEETO: Exactly – the moment you call it “this feels wrong/bad” you actively object, reject and fight the feeling. Instead you can acknowledge it as part and parcel of what you are, a feeling being genetically endowed with instinctual passions and it accompanying feelings. This very acknowledgement will not only diminish the “wrong/bad” feeling and enable you to get back to feeling reasonably good, it also allows you to recognize that you are this feeling in contrast to merely have the feeling. From this point to can choose which feeling you rather be. It is impossible to change the feeling by merely “intending to feel good” as long as the dissociation of having the feeling operates. FELIX: There are a couple of other layers too. When I’m feeling bad or anxious, I start to worry that I’m a complete failure, that I’ve messed up my entire life, that I’ve been flailing with actualism for years, etc etc etc. VINEETO: Ah, the familiar habit of putting yourself down which makes you feeling even worse and more anxious. FELIX: It makes me double down harder. I refuse to distract myself. I don’t express or repress. I sit in a room with nothing but looking at the feeling. It’s the “controlled” way again which does not work. Even if I say I’m going to feel good no matter what happens, it doesn’t get me there. VINEETO: See the red flag? Turn back, WRONG WAY. FELIX: It’s a bit like those mindfulness people who get themselves all out of sorts mentally… though I wouldn’t say I’m dissociating… but still it feels very depressive and dysfunctional/ unsafe. VINEETO: You are dissociating as long as you (instinctively) feel you can will/ force yourself to feel differently. To summarize and repeat the above – Stop fighting Stop blaming yourself (that in itself should result in getting back to feeling good) Stop calling this ‘doing actualism’ Acknowledge and become aware that you are your feelings (your genetic heritage which all feeling being share) Be the feeling without rejection or blame or escaping Choose to be a different feeling (such as feeling good) FELIX: So instead I let it go/give up, I go do something else, and in the course of a few hours and by interacting with others etc I get myself back to feeling good, in a natural/ unforced way. VINEETO: There is a third alternative, you know? See above instructions and consciously apply those for a change (in the order as listed). FELIX: I find socialising is the best way for me to get back to feeling good – there is safety and confidence, compared to that very alone/anxious state I sometimes end up in. Then when I’m feeling good like now, I treat myself much less harshly, I feel like it’s all going to work out probably, and that I’m all good. (I also feel good about myself). I can laugh about it now haha but it’s a genuine habit this type of catastrophizing. VINEETO: Well, it works in the short run but it does not prevent those very same feelings in their very intensity, and the very same reaction, again and again. FELIX: Can I ask you: Why is it that sitting and saying “I’m going to feel good” doesn’t work? Is it a question of misaligned intent? VINEETO: No, it’s a question of misaligned application. FELIX: Once feeling good I can perpetuate it easily (by appreciating), but when feeling bad no amount of intent seems to get it to move. Is it because one is escaping what one is, by seeing oneself as having feelings rather than being those feelings? Regarding “being one’s feelings” – is it more important to try to be one’s feelings (rather than have them) at all times, regardless of what those feelings are? Or should you still have feeling good be the main focus? VINEETO: Yes, see point #4 but don’t try it/ will it/ force it before you have done step #1, #2 and #3. FELIX: What I’m getting at is – I have an intent to feel good come what may. I would very much like to do that. But I don’t trust that that intent is the right kind of intent, because I’ve already experienced a million times over that I’ve actually driven in the opposite direction to feeling good whilst ostensibly wanting so much to feel good. VINEETO: Your intent is presently missing the harmless aspect – you keep harming yourself and possibly others in the process. FELIX: I’m confused about intent and control – how to wilfully/ skilfully go in the right direction while also not at all controlling what that is. VINEETO: Control is the real-world tool to get what one wants/ intends. Affective attentiveness is the third alternative tool to reach one’s intent – Richard: The intent is you will become happy and harmless. The intent is you will be free of sorrow and malice. The intent is you will become blithesome and benign. The intent is you will be free of fear and aggression. The intent is you will become carefree and considerate. The intent is you will be free from nurture and desire. The intent is you will become gay and benevolent. The intent is you will be free of anguish and animosity. (Richard, Attentiveness, Sensuousness, Apperceptiveness) FELIX: Or do you think that these questions constitute “map building”/ strategy (i.e. non naïveté) and that just more affinity with feeling good ongoing will answer all these questions? VINEETO: As I was trying to convey in this post is that you keep jumping ahead while ignoring the very first vital steps of the tools Richard provided on the wide and wondrous path to become happy and harmless. Naiveté cannot flourish as long as you are habitually blaming yourself, don’t you agree? Cheers Vineeto June 4 2025 FELIX: Hey Vineeto – thanks for your detailed reply. VINEETO: Hi Felix, You are very welcome, maybe read it again in a week’s time to see if you are applying all the details. FELIX: Yes, you’re right, I essentially have had a strong masochistic streak and so my application of the method has been very self-punitive and anxiety ridden. Forced and not built on a sincere/benevolent intention. But I am starting to undo those habits. I was curious as to how you would answer my questions, but it’s not because I was… making arguments in favour of that way of operating haha. VINEETO: I understand, it was for the purpose of labelling. But then the question is what to do about it once you know that. FELIX: The intensity, shame and anxiety has been an elaborate survival strategy I think – and, as you point out, one that had utility in previous points of my life like childhood but not anymore. VINEETO: Yes, then you had no other choice but now you have. Consider it like an addiction and treat it as such – decline each instance of it. FELIX: I’ve also been looking at family stuff because aspects of my relationship with my family have helped perpetuate and reinforced some of those anxiety and self image problems. VINEETO: I was aware of that but you had to find out for yourself. After all this is/was the environment where you developed this self-hating/ self-blaming addiction. FELIX: But meanwhile, there is an adult functional me emerging and I’m enjoying discovering (or rediscovering the fun of life). VINEETO: That’s great to hear Felix, as Kuba quoted Richard yesterday – Richard: “Do your own thing … but have fun; if you’re not having fun then, hell, stop doing it, something is wrong; if you’re not having fun, if you have to force yourself to go to work, if you’re unhappy, something is wrong”. (Richard, List D, No. 6, 14 December 2009) Cheers Vineeto June 6 2025 FELIX: I’ve started embarking on the “PCE walk” again – I think it’s been years since I was going that route emphatically. I’m in a different position now, so it was a really interesting experience. I’m going to start at the end, how I’m feeling now, and work back. I’m currently experiencing a sensuous anonymity – much less in the way than my daily self. Awareness is dipping a lot deeper now, showing that the “shell” of me is wayyyyy more empty than I thought before. My current “day to day” state is somewhat like – “ok I’m doing all the right things, I’m not chastising myself, I’m not pushing on experience, I’m not escaping, I’m not dissociating” – but still there is this sense of existential being mucking things up. A murkiness of fluctuating mood states that is definitely not as much attached to real world states anymore, but is nonetheless lurking there. It could also be caused by overactive mindfulness sort of dragging down my affective mood as well. VINEETO: Hi Felix, It’s great that you are tackling your habit of chastising yourself. However, several things you have said in this post, and the next two messages, indicate that you are indeed still dissociating. First, I like to let you know that a “PCE walk” is the invention of the ‘affers’, the people from Dharma Overground who have consistently attempted to marry their post-buddhistic practice with actualism (see Latest Announcement). It is certainly not actualism – Richard: This perpetual enjoyment and appreciation is facilitated by feeling as happy and as harmless as is humanly possible. And this (affective) felicity/ innocuity is potently enabled via minimisation of both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ feelings. An affective awareness is the key to maximising felicity and innocuity over all those alternate feelings inasmuch the slightest diminishment of enjoyment and appreciation automatically activates attentiveness. Attentiveness to the cause of diminished enjoyment and appreciation restores felicity and innocuity. The habituation of actualistic awareness and attentiveness requires a persistent initialisation; (…) If ‘I’ am not feeling good then ‘I’ have something to look at to find out why. (…) ... one does not have to trace back into one’s childhood ... usually no more than yesterday afternoon at the most. (…) Once the specific moment of ceasing to feel good is pin-pointed, and the silliness of having such an incident as that (no matter what it is) take away one’s enjoyment and appreciation of this only moment of being alive is seen for what it is – usually some habitual reactive response – one is once more feeling good ... but with a pin-pointed cue to watch out for next time so as to not have that trigger off yet another bout of the same-old same-old. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, Articles, This Moment of Being Alive). “Mindfulness” is a practice of ‘noting’ and not “an affective awareness” – which in contrast to ‘noting’ is an awareness how you experience your feelings at this moment of being alive. Also, ‘noting’ stops at simply ‘noting’ what’s going on whereas with the actualism methods you pay attention to “slightest diminishment of enjoyment and appreciation” and do what it takes to get back to enjoyment and appreciation, as described above. Then you talk about “overactive mindfulness sort of dragging down my affective mood as well”. Mindfulness, overactive or not, is not the actualism method either, it is mental/ cognitive not affective, and instructs you to just note and put it aside as noted or, in buddhistic practice as unsatisfactory (dukkha). Fact is that in the perceptive process feelings come first and then there is a cognitive response (what you call “mindfulness”) unless one has trained oneself to suppress feelings – Hence what is necessary for the actualism method (not your version of it) to work is to actually allow yourself to feel the feelings. FELIX: This was the fodder for my walk, to try to work out this discrepancy. Affective awareness was my main tool, simply noticing the kind of undulating feelings I was experiencing as I went along, as well as the mental chatter that accompanied them. (…) VINEETO: When you say “try to work out this discrepancy” – which “discrepancy” are you talking about? “Simply noticing the kind of undulating feelings” is not the actualist affective awareness with the sincere intent to get back to feeling good, enjoying and appreciating of being alive as described above, and as such ineffective at best. FELIX: I am just continuing to investigate, noticing these flavours that are coming through and attempting to penetrate the stygian nature of the psyche. (…) VINEETO: Before it makes sense “to penetrate the stygian nature of the psyche”, you first have to abandon the habit of dissociating from your feelings so that you are able to get back to feeling good. Remember: Richard: “… one does not have to trace back into one’s childhood ... usually no more than yesterday afternoon at the most.” Perhaps it helps to remind you of what I wrote in my last post – Vineeto: You are dissociating as long as you (instinctively) feel you can will/ force yourself to feel differently. To summarize and repeat the above – Stop fighting Stop blaming yourself (that in itself should result in getting back to feeling good) Stop calling this ‘doing actualism’ Acknowledge and become aware that you are your feelings (your genetic heritage which all feeling being share) Be the feeling without rejection or blame or escaping Choose to be a different feeling (such as feeling good) (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Felix, 3 June 2025) “Stop fighting” includes stopping dissociating. Notice dissociation and distancing, and pinpoint which feeling is dissociated from by stopping to fight this particular feeling. Only when you are no longer dissociating can you get back to feeling good, otherwise it is merely ignoration/ repression of the feeling. Point 3: Stop calling this dissociation from feelings, “mindfulness”, doing “PCE-walk”, and an apparent “attempting to penetrate the stygian nature of the psyche” whilst still dissociating, ‘actualism’ – it is not. I am putting it so bluntly to save you more times of distress and going round in circles by using methodology which has nothing to do with the actualism method which is the key to get you out of your mess. FELIX: There is something here too as I continue to investigate/ contemplate. VINEETO: Even when I’m attempting to be my feelings, STILL there is a cunning dissociation and distancing. It’s like I see myself as the puppeteer of my own mood states, looking down at my feelings through a microscope. And therefore my application of the method is also disrupted/ poisoned by this misunderstanding. To use another metaphor, it’s as if my attempt at the method is about trying to keep the ball of feeling good in the air. I am the one anxiously trying to keep the ball “where it needs to be”, rather than truly experientially understanding that my mood and me are literally one and the same. It’s me. Yes, that is a perspicacious and honest acknowledgement. This dissociation is especially obvious when you describe what you call “looking down at my feelings through a microscope”. Other expressions are ‘keeping one’s feelings at arm’s length’, which is another euphemism for dissociation. Even if you didn’t have official dissociation training such as vipassana, you nevertheless had learned to use it in your early life as a survival tactic with the result of having many feelings express themselves in psycho-somatic effects such as excessive stress. I highly recommend Claudiu’s detailed and candid report of how he, eventually, successfully extracted himself from the habit of his learned dissociation – Claudiu: Though I had noticed this in my own experience, I hadn’t formed it quite so succinctly in my mind. I noticed that, thanks to many months of training myself to do so following the advice written in MCTB and given to me by the DhO participants, is that I had reduced everything to physical sensations – touch, sight, sound, etc., with thoughts thrown in as well (though there was debate as to whether thoughts can also just be reduced to one of the five senses). Thus, when I felt something unpleasant in my body, or some persistent tension, the only recourse, meditatively, was to put my attention on it, and notice it as being ‘impermanent’ (that is, as according to MCTB, vibrating in real-time at a certain frequency), ‘not-self’ (that is, as according to MCTB, happening on its own without a ‘self’ involved), and ‘dukkha’ (that is, according to MCTB, unsatisfactory in some fundamental way). The affect itself is taken completely out of the picture. It is noticed, but it is noticed strictly as a physical sensation, and the solution is to do something about that physical sensation.(…) Thus there seems to be a tension with a weird and unknown cause because that very cause is something that one is denying exists. The tension is painful in and of itself but is made further painful by actively identifying it as unsatisfactory. This naturally leads to aversion and one tries one’s hardest to make those sensations go away however one can, which ends up being an attempt to suppress the affect. (…) The tensions were still there when I was not doing anything in particular, though, thanks to my aforementioned months of mental training. I found, though, that if I simply asked myself what the problem was, I would soon get an answer! I had noticed this before but it hadn’t quite hit home in the same way – whenever I felt that tension it simply meant that something was bothering me! It was remarkably difficult at first to figure out just what that was, though. The overwhelming unpleasantness of the physical tension made it hard to keep a cool head and actually look at what was going on. It was a fear of seeing what was actually wrong, likely because of the suppressive nature of the meditation I had been doing (even though I was self-describing it as not being suppressive). I found I thought of a metaphor wherein I had to undunk my head from my body in some intuitive way – to back off morbidly focusing on the physical sensations – to allow the affect to be felt. This took some active doing but it was well-worth it. (…) I still experience these tensions occasionally but now I’m actually able to say as much without causing the tension to arise/get any worse. Now I know that whenever something like that starts up, there’s simply something bothering me, and it’s just up to me to either sit down and figure out what it is on the spot, or, if I’m too tired or unwilling or lazy, to distract myself and put it off until later. The latter option is becoming less and less appealing as time goes on, however. Richard: ‘Words cannot properly express just how much of a dastardly act it was for the affers to co-opt Actualism, subsume it under a tawdry facsimile of Buddhism (there have been no arahants for more than two millennia because of sectarianism), and thus unnecessarily perpetuate the suffering of humankind. In eleven days time the direct-route, to the already always existing peace-on-earth, will have been available for three (3) years ... and what do they do instead? Go sit on a cushion, withdraw from the physical, induce altered states, ‘dark nights’, depressions, anxieties ... there is even a jhana-jockey hospice being set-up to nurse the casualties. ‘Tis craziness run riot ... utter madness’. (from Richard, List D, Claudiu, 18 December 2012) We talked about this before on the forum and you basically said it only partially applies to your own situation. Nevertheless I recommend reading it again with all possible (i.e. fascinated) attentiveness because I think a lot of this pattern is still operating and causing you distress and “seriousness” and a faulty interpretation of the actualism method. FELIX: Can I trade letting this moment live me – with my seriousness about trying to do (my version of) actualism. I.e. can I let this moment be fun, each moment again; by dropping the habit of coopting every moment for its apparent utility in needing to achieve my aims as an actualist. I think I can. VINEETO: You can try, of course. But I think you can only do this if you completely drop all aspects of “(my version of) actualism” and start afresh. Cheers Vineeto June 7 2025 FELIX: I’ve actually started to feel my feelings so fully. I think the “dissociation” occurs where I push aside my feelings and try to achieve without going through them. The post the other night was an example of that but I was picking myself up on it. (…) That sounds so obvious, the same thing everyone here has seen and read a thousand times. But I’m starting to have a visceral understanding of it. It’s hard to convey over text. There is sincerity there and things are changing. I’m starting to realise I can feel good – that I must feel good. Not the must of intense feeling, the must of benevolence. I clarify all this not to be argumentative but because I think it’s beneficial that what I’m doing is documented accurately. I understand, though, that it would be exceptionally difficult for you to determine just from reading, exactly what’s happening for different people. I know your only goal is to help people through the psychic maze. And it’s really appreciated. Yet I recognise one is “alone in this endeavour”, so I have to trust I’m on the right track, because I think I am. The weird thing is that this is all happening right now. Even as I write this very post. As I sit here… there is such a visceral feeling good emerging. It’s untechnical. It’s so … nascent. A shift is happening. I know this will sound ridiculous… but it’s like some sort of MDMA suppository. As in, strong feelings of wellbeing, coming seemingly from nowhere. And there is wonder, including wonder that this shift is happening. VINEETO: Hi Felix, This sounds really wonderful and I am very pleased to read such good news. Cheers Vineeto June 11 2025 FELIX: Still applying getting back to feeling good – at the moment it’s basically all I’m doing. Either I feel good, or I don’t. VINEETO: Hi Felix, Just to be sure – trying to get back to feeling good is different to actually getting back to feeling good – Richard: It is really very, very simple (which is possibly why it has never been discovered before this): you felt good previously; you are not feeling good now; something happened to you to end that felicitous/ innocuous feeling; you find out what happened; you see how silly that is (no matter what it was); you are once more feeling good. (Richard, List D, No. 11, 19 November 2009) FELIX: I realise I have been tempted again and again and again into anxiety, despair, self castigation – none of which is what the actualism method is about. VINEETO: Of course when some feeling is sticky, such that it reoccurs again and again, the trigger need to be recognized and after getting back to feeling good to take a closer look and explore it as much as you dare, chip away at it, so to speak to eventually take it out at the root. For instance you say further below that “I’ve spent most of my life feeling extremely self-conscious”, meaning you give others a lot of power how you should be, appear, behave which ultimately makes you feel bad about yourself. As I said to another recently – Vineeto: It’s a general rule of thumb ‘Vineeto’ found in ‘her’ investigations – if ‘she’ couldn’t shake off a bad feeling it was usually that ‘she’ wanted to keep/ defend its opposite good feeling. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Kuba7, 9 June 2025). It’s really the ‘good’ feelings, those one cherishes and keeps close to one’s heart, which are the hardest to dislodge. But they are also the ones which keep the ‘bad’ feelings in place. Take “anxiety” and “self castigation”, they both have their origin in you wanting to please others and not disappoint your friends/family. ‘Vineeto’, in a conversation with Richard, learnt it can be loyalty and it gave her a great boost to dig into that deeper – RESPONDENT: Meanwhile, I also wondered if you had discussed about peasant mentality with Peter and Vineeto, during their feeling being days, because there is no mention of this peasant mentality even in their journals... RICHARD: Yes, it was discussed – mostly touched upon from time-to-time, as appropriate to a particular situation and/or set of circumstances, rather than emphasised as a core issue in regards to actualism/ actual freedom – and the main aspect which feeling-being ‘Vineeto’ (for example) came to grips with in the early days was loyalty. A clue as to how soon that topic came up is contained in a snippet of a discussion about loyalty itself which happened to be tape-recorded, in 1997, and transcribed in ‘The Compassion Gained Through Forgiveness Binds’. A short way down the page the following exchange takes place. Viz.: (Footnote). In that text I am reminding ‘her’ how there had been a conversation about loyalty on the second or third occasion ‘she’ had visited – and I can recall, even now, how on that initial occasion it had touched a responsive chord in ‘her’ as something vital to examine – as ‘she’ had shifted ‘her’ familially-inculcated and societally-instilled allegiance to ‘the system’ at large over onto the spiritual commune which ‘she’ had been a live-in member for the better part of nigh-on seventeen years. (Richard, List D, No. 32a, 19 June 2015). Footnote Q2= ‘Vineeto’: R: I remember you and I having a conversation about loyalty the second or third time you came here. You were realising that you had loyalty to hold you back. Q2: Yes, it took a while for me to work through. It is a feeling of belonging, and when I dismantled what loyalty is made up of then it loses its virtue. R: It is connected with belonging? To a particular group? So all these group therapies that people do, they would not question that loyalty, would they? Because they belong to that very group that is running the therapies. The whole thing of the commune. Q(2): It’s a new loyalty – away from the family and toward the [Rajneesh] commune. R: Whereas I am only interested in being rid of loyalty altogether – however strange that may initially seem. [Emphasis added]. (Audio-Taped Dialogues, The Compassion Gained Through Forgiveness Binds) FELIX: A bit of therapy and looking at my childhood etc has actually helped. Nothing excessive but just to realise that I’ve spent most of my life feeling extremely self-conscious – as if always looking at myself from an external point of view (the view of others – how they see me, what I need to be/ achieve in order to be acceptable to others). These days my life is coming back into bloom so to speak. I am no longer living that intense, lone wolf lifestyle which is clearly not conducive to feeling good. I think something can happen as an actualist where, because feeling good seems like the hard part, you focus on dismantling social identity. This can turn into a lot… avoidance, turning away from others, isolation etc which starts to look and feel more like depression (with a lot of negative-self rumination). Clear signs of feeling good for me include things like feeling good in my body (not like I’m taking up space), being confident and at ease, finding it easy to relate to others and care for them, a sense of fun and being on holiday. The more I feel that the easier it is to make a habit of it. It’s taken a long time to learn that but I’m getting it! That life was meant to be fun. VINEETO: I’m pleased to see that you are having more and more fun. Also, “it’s taken a long time to learn” because there is a life-time (your life-time up to now) to unlearn, whilst the old being is constantly re-introduced/ reinforced by society and ‘humanity’ around you. You can pat yourself on the back. Cheers Vineeto June 17 2025 FELIX: Regarding the huge affective ramp up that you describe – excellence experiences – I have had a few powerful ones before so I know exactly what you mean. However – hehe – I have NO idea how to make them happen and it has now been a long time since I’ve had one like that. Also – the word I always used for those “yank you by the neck and pull you into another dimension” EEs was dynamic – they had such an element of unbelievable… not even sure what to call it. Power isn’t the right word… but basically akin to literally being pulled into another dimension. VINEETO: Hi Felix, When you re-read those two paragraphs, can you see what happened? You say “I have had a few powerful ones [excellence experiences] before” was when ‘you’, the controller, was not in charge, else it would not have been an excellence experience. Afterwards, the controller takes back the controls and gives directions what to do and how to act/practice, as if it was all the ‘controller’s’ doing, but naturally “I have NO idea how to make them happen”. FELIX: Then I started to wonder, given that I know PCEs are “still”, if my using EEs was some other thing – like maybe they weren’t the right route after all. Maybe the way into stillness was by being “still” affectively. It’s not that I actively tried to stop having them but more-so a matter of just not being sure what I did. Then the more I’ve tried to bring results since then, the more that seemed to scupper things. Hence why I have reoriented myself to feeling good in the virtual freedom way (which is still really good). And obviously if I continue like this my overall mood will keep going up and increasing likelihood of peak experiences over time. VINEETO: Can you see that your modus operandi devising a plan to ‘organize’ “the right route” to achieve this or that as if moving chess-pieces on a board into certain directions? Now, becoming aware of this organising the next step in advance bit by bit, you can acknowledge that you are mapping out your future from arm’s length, pat yourself on the back for discovering it … and instead relax, feel good and above all appreciate being alive, in this very moment that you can ever experience ... and let life unfold in a more naïve way. FELIX: You are correct to say that, in one’s normal state going about one’s day, there is a bit of a tendency to “focus on sensuosity” with more of a neutral affect – purely because in the PCE equation, the felicity side seems like less of an easy lever to pull compared to sensuosity. So you are exciting me reminding me of EEs but as the feeling being currently occupying this moment – it’s hard to know what I would do in this moment or any other moment in order to elicit such an event. Which is perhaps where summoning up delight comes in. Then becomes a question of how… tracing back? Craig’s ladder? Rememoration? Most things I try feel like a kind of artifice that has little power to budge my affective “set point” (to use a Srid word). VINEETO: In regards to your mentioning “my affective ‘set point’” Richard’s article on “Marvelling at how well equipped human beings are” has great detailed information how to up-level blind-nature’s default set-point (not as an “artifice” but via doing it in real life) from feeling neutral to feeling good to feeling better to feeling excellent via increasing affective appreciation and paying affective attention to triggers of diminishment. Above you considered a few more attempts to reach into the toolbox (like “focus on sensuosity” or “Craig’s ladder? Rememoration?”), to find the right shortcut “to elicit such an event” when the successful way to proceed is in the opposite direction – to allow it to happen (see Frequent Question 64) by more and more enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive. Claudiu cleared up important points about this “focus on sensuosity”. As Kuba so succinctly described – Kuba: This is really interesting Felix, so from what I can understand before your approach would be something like shuttling from anxiety et al and then all the way into EEs, with no stable feeling good as a baseline? So instead the recent approach has been to focus on establishing this stable baseline of feeling good – just a general sense of well-being in order to get away from that kind of intense oscillation. Perhaps this doesn’t look ambitious enough, good enough, fast enough, or seems boring, small beer or some similar feeling-backed impression, which needs looking at and declining first and instead proceed “establishing this stable baseline of feeling good” by discovering and dismantling the objections to doing to. Just to let you know it is not a small feat to dare to be happy and harmless – Richard: It takes great daring to be happy/ harmless, at all times/ in all situations/ in every circumstance, in the face of entrenched societal disapproval. However, as to dare to care is to care to dare then that great daring is thus fuelled by genuine concern for peace-on-earth as a living actuality. (Richard, List D, No. 15, 3 December 2009) To put it another way – what is the underlying affective reason why you so urgently want to jump from how you are now straight to and EE or PCE or better still straight to an actual freedom? Is there perhaps a resentment to being here the cause of this, not unlike an upside-down pyramid teetering on its capstone? How can a resentment to being here give rise to an excellence experience when the ‘upside-down capstone’ is rotten? Whereas when you find and remove (give up) the ‘upside-down capstone’ then feeling good, better, excellent can flourish of its own accord. FELIX: Your post seems to imply that EEs are necessary for PCEs but then when I think of Pamela on the DVDs she does seem to go from “good mood” in one moment to instant PCE in the next without the EE roller-coaster. VINEETO: I just watched the DVD with Pamela to verify how you have condensed your impression and I found that she had talked about a recent altered state she had had and the feelings of gratitude she experienced then. Because Richard asked her specific questions she contemplated and rememorated aspects of that experience and then contemplated what the contrast was to PCEs she had had in the past. Only then, when this topic was concluded and Richard asked her how she is now, then she slipped into a PCE. So, your summary merely describes this as “good mood” and does not include all those details of rememoration and contemplation. On top of it you classify/ reduce an excellence experience to a “roller-coaster”. I would say that you, the ‘controller’/ ‘doer’ has a minimalistic therefore ineffective narrative devising the plans for future actions. FELIX: Obviously interested in your input too Vineeto. VINEETO: I am curious what you make of it. Cheers Vineeto June 25 2025 FELIX: (…) What is this oversleeping ambition and desperation? It’s pathological. It’s like “I” won’t let myself relax until I achieve this thing that I absolutely must must must achieve. And why? Is it for peace on earth? Or is it for my own means my own sense of self, my own need to accomplish something on this earth. Vineeto is right, it’s always better/ faster/ stronger – preventing even a simple baseline level of feeling good. VINEETO: Hi Felix, Hold that thought/ insight that your impulse is to be “always better/ faster/ stronger”. This very insight is the dawning of the actualism method – Respondent: How does the mere seeing how silly it is make us happy once again? Richard: Because nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth getting malicious or miserable about (let alone compensatingly loving and compassionate) when the realisation that this moment is the only one there ever is becomes the actuality it already always is. To explain: just as space is an arena for objects to exist in so too is time an arena (so to speak) for events to occur; just as the arena called space does not move neither does the arena (so too speak) called time move, either. A clock (originally a primitive sundial) measures the rate of rotation of planet earth on its axis; a calendar measures the rate of its orbit around its star (the sun); neither is a measure of time as time eternally stands still. Is it not silly to be malicious/ miserable (or counter-actively loving/ compassionate) where felicity/ innocuity is eternally available? Is it not sensible to be felicitous/ innocuous instead? [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List D, No. 11, 24 November 2009). It's a longstanding habit for you but that doesn’t mean you cannot decline this silly suggestion of being “always better/ faster/ stronger”, the moment you become aware of it happening. FELIX: I’ve never seen this clearly before. I mean I knew I’ve always been a bit “intense”, goal-focused etc – but I couldn’t see it in my awareness because my awareness was so co-opted by this drive. It’s so hidden – it seems to be almost intrinsic to my very being, and a deep survival mechanism that’s encoded in my nervous system. It’s “Felix’s way”, that I’ve used for everything since a small child. “If I don’t work hard, if I am not enough, if I relax – I’m going to be exiled or die.” And all of this has been put into actualism – it could have been anything else and I would have still had incremental success to distract me from it, but not this. The pea under the mattress that has not allowed me to sleep. In a way (my application of) actualism has further held my feet to the fire and kept me constantly striving more than ever. VINEETO: Yes, it’s clearly “Felix’s way” and you persistently perpetuate it as doing “actualism” when it is nothing of the sort. And you already found the answer why you feel driven to do it “Felix’s way” – “if I don’t work hard, if I am not enough, if I relax – I’m going to be exiled or die.” For simplicity sake you can call this fear (or being scared or being anxious …) and here is what Richard suggests you do in this situation – the moment you become aware of this feeling of fear driving you to act in “Felix’s way”, STOP. Stop in your tracks, take some deep breaths and stop rejecting/ fighting the panic. Just let it be there, this is ‘who’ you ARE in this moment, it’s ok, all feeling beings are feeling like this at one time or another. You will notice, the fear diminishes because you don’t add affective energy to that feeling when you stop resisting it/ blaming yourself (in the name of trying to feel good, for instance). When you genuinely stop resisting to feel how you feel/ stop resisting that you feel this way (because it’s not the “Felix’s way”), then you’ll find that the intensity of the feeling diminishes to the point of feeling good. That’s not a permanent change but a beginning to counteract this persistent habit of torturing yourself this way. FELIX: Tears are coming as I write this. It’s very unusual for me – I think I am coming to something genuine. The relief of seeing this. The “Spannung” (tension) that has been wound and wound and wound over years is gently unwinding a bit and it feels good. I just read Richard’s quote about letting this moment live one, rather than trying to live in the moment. • [Richard]: (…). I have oft-times said that if one allows this moment to live one (rather than trying to live in the moment) one’s journey will be over sooner rather than later. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 32, 27 April 2002). I’m starting to realise that I am deathly afraid to be naive. At the same time I’m realising that I can be. Lots of tears. I don’t want to fight anymore. VINEETO: There is no need to jump from I “won’t let myself relax until I achieve this thing” and the fear of “if I don’t work hard, if I am not enough, if I relax – I’m going to be exiled or die” to suddenly being naïve – that is again pushing/ driving yourself to do the impossible. First get back to feeling good by declining this habit of driving yourself, no matter to what. Naiveté happens when you learn to be able to allow it to happen – so first turn off the flame under the pressure cooker and let the accumulated pressure subside before you attempt to lift the lid (if you are familiar with pressure cookers you’ll understand). While you are allowing yourself to relax, and contemplate that this fear that you are “going to be exiled or die” is not backed up by factual evidence – then permit yourself to have some fun and enjoy. You can even contemplate to be in a different way to the “Felix’s way”, perhaps temporary at first, as a test drive, and when you like the new way, then for a bit longer … Cheers Vineeto
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