Affective Awareness

[Richard]: ‘(…) It is a question, not a phrase to be memorised and repeated slogan-like (or as if chanting a mantra for instance), and it soon becomes a non-verbal attitude to life ... a wordless approach each moment again whereupon one cannot be anything else but (affectively) aware of one’s every instinctual impulse/affective feeling, and thus self-centred thought, as it is happening.

Through the rigorous and persistent process of actualism, I slowly learnt to extend my attention beyond what I thought and felt, i.e. my ideals and passions, so as to become aware of the tangible effects that my thoughts, feelings and actions had on the people around me. I discovered more and more that feeling myself to be harmless and actually being harmless were two completely different things. This process of distinguishing between feeling and actuality is the key to actually becoming happy and harmless compared to merely feeling happy and harmless.

Hence being (affectively) aware, each moment again, of more and more subtle variations in the quality of one’s moment-to-moment enjoyment and appreciation of being alive/ of being here so as to earlier and earlier pre-empt any potential reversion to type.

This hyphenated neologism – a term which includes being affectively aware in combination with, and as felt necessary thereby, being cognitively attentive (the Latin cum=with, together with, or along with, as in ‘a garage-cum-workshop’, for instance) – was coined in order to more readily reference an adroit technique which involves a keenly discriminative affective monitoring of the quality of mood plus the cognitive rectification of same, and as instigated responsively‌ therefrom, so as to effect beneficial modification of one’s day-by-day temperament which, in the longer-term, brings about a benefactive transformation of disposition and/or character as well. Any necessity to be (cognitively) attentive only takes place on those occasions when/ where an otherwise ongoing (affective) enjoyment and appreciation diminishes – which attentiveness is initiated by that diminution in the quality of (affectively) enjoying and appreciating being alive/ being here, each moment again, come-what-may – and occurs less and less once one gets the knack of thus (affectively) monitoring one’s moment-to-moment mood and temperament via the increasingly subtle variations in that quality.