Does asceticism play any role in Actual Freedom? Logically it would seem having your desires more obvious and aggravated would allow you to more clearly see the harm they and the self causing them cause. maybe eating one meal a day sleeping less etc. would help? any thoughts?

I also had to realize that after I’ve been through certain intense feelings and passions there is nothing further to be learned from staying in the feeling. I used to be suspicious of Richard’s expression of ‘nipping the feeling in the bud’, ostensibly for the reason that it could be confused with repressing the feeling. But now I realized that I was also avoiding the technique itself because ‘I’ wanted to hang onto being ‘the explorer’ of deep passions whenever they occurred and I can see now that there is neither meaning nor value in ceaselessly examining an instinctual passion over and over and over again. In other words I have come to understand that no valuable insight is to be gained from deeply and repeatedly feeling fear – the most prominent of the passions for me – and this understanding has greatly helped to simply notice and label the feeling, in this case my fear of oblivion, and then get on with enjoying this moment of being alive, which is after all the point of actualism.