Adam . .:
Ok I am going to keep trying. Btw since you have the understanding now that Neil didn't perhaps you could help me next time I run into the same situation
If I can help you, you
won't run into the same situation :-)
That was pretty much the point, but perhaps it didn't come across too well.
If you want the essay and the autobiography, let me know. Meanwhile here's a nutshell version of what I'd suggest if you want to pursue actualism but haven't had great results so far:
- Don't try to feel good, just be willing to.
- Find a way to know yourself in action, without blame regarding your feelings.
- Be in control of your actions, act with restraint, but let your feelings be there blamelessly. Take the lid off.
- Have an attitude of open curiosity with regard to your feelings; don't wrestle to make them conform to an ideal.
- Understand that this 'you' in action, and it's not your fault for being this way. Get used to seeing yourself that way.
- Get used to seeing other people that way too, with a similarly open, blameless and curious attitude.
- Seeing yourself this way reduces any secondary and tertiary agitations: division, confusion, fruitless attempts to manipulate.
- Seeing other people this way reduces the tendency to compete, dominate, submit, collude, put your best foot forward, cover up your weaknesses, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
- It reduces the sense of ownership, defensiveness, self-assertiveness, and secret fear/doubt that comes with investing a certain identity / being a certain way.
- Be curious about this combination of human feelings and human traits that is 'you'. Understand that you're not uniquely oppressed, not uniquely blessed, and somehow it makes you less inclined to personalise these traits -- but at the same time, you're not denying or dissociating from them. They're there. They're 'you'. As a first step, you can harmlessly contain them all.
- Letting it be as it is, and being curious about it, puts you in the driver's seat better than trying to take control and force the issue. But don't let that -- (being in the driver's seat) -- be the aim, let it be a welcome side effect.
- Don't try to
generate feelings of a certain kind.
- Don't try to
override feelings of a certain kind.
- Don't worry about feeling happy. Let feelings of happiness arise naturally -- and they will -- from clearer understanding, more clarity, less confusion, less futile effort, having less to promote, less to hide, more transparency, less opaqueness of 'being'. (Only then -- in my experience, anyway -- does it really make sense to talk about
choosing to be felicitous, rather than some of the other ways of 'being'. Prior to that, it's just one fragment of personality trying to rule the others or reason them into cooperating, which doesn't work very well for very long, no matter how sensible the reasons are).
- ...