Seeing the silliness

RESPONDENT No 23: What about when I find out what happened to end feeling good and I see that it is silly to keep worrying about it yet that doesn’t stop the worrying and I am not back to feeling good?

RICHARD: Two things immediately leap to mind … (1) you value feeling worry (a feeling of anxious concern) over feeling good (a general sense of well-being) … and (2) you have not really seen it is silly to feel bad (a general sense of ill-being). What I would suggest, at this point, is to feel the silliness of feeling bad (in this case feeling anxiety) … then the seeing (as in a realisation) might very well have the desired effect (as in an actualisation) of once more feeling good.

RESPONDENT: a) I am not able to see the silliness of feeling bad …

RICHARD: Do you comprehend that, although the past was actual when it was happening, it is not actual now and that, although the future will be actual when it does happen, it is not actual now … that only this moment is actual?

If so, do you further comprehend that anytime you felt good/will feel good does not mean a thing if you are not feeling good now … that a remembered occasion/an anticipated occasion pales into insignificance if you are feeling bad now?

Furthermore, do you understand that to be living this moment – the only moment you are ever alive – by feeling bad is to be frittering away a vital opportunity to be fully alive … to totally enjoy and appreciate being what you indubitably are (a sensate creature) whilst you are here on this planet?

If so, is it not silly to waste this only moment you are ever alive by feeling bad … when you could be feeling good?

http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/selectedcorrespondence/sc-sense.htm

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  • Harmlessness

    VINEETO: [..] When I made it my goal to become harmless, in the early days I sometimes felt toothless, castrated and helpless, particularly in situations where I felt I was being ‘wronged’ or I was being treated ‘unjustly’. But once these feeling subsided and I looked at the situation as it really was, I could see how silly it would have been to waste my time passionately fighting other people or riling against the beliefs, morals or ethics of other people in order for ‘me’ to be right or for ‘me’ to feel justly treated. The simple act of becoming aware of having antagonistic and/or indignant feelings inevitably caused me to look at my own ideas and ideals of what I thought and felt was ‘right’ and ‘just’ and ‘fair’– after all the only person I need to change, and can change, is me.

  • Basic Resentment
  • Actualism Method
    Seeing the silliness at having felicity/ innocuity be usurped, by either the negative or positive feelings, for whatever reason that might be automatically restores felicity/ innocuity.

    Also, repeated experience had shown ‘him’ that minor dips🥌️ in that quality presaged each major diminution⛰️ – indeed miniscule blips⚛️️ soon became evident even earlier than those minor dips as ‘his’ ability to (affectively) detect subtle variations in the affective tone of mood and temperament[^1] became evermore fine-tuned – and the earlier such habituated silliness could be (affectively) discerned the sooner ‘he’ could thus nip these instinctual potentialities in the bud.

    And the nipping-it-in-the-bud is that when you start to feel even irritated or slightly irked at something, you learn to recognize – it’s like a red-light goes off/ starts flashing or bells start ringing – you know that here-you-go-again … back to on this path you have been going umpteen thousands of times in a lifetime and it doesn’t lead to anywhere fruitftul at all. So, the nipping-it-in-the-bud is to, in effect, decline – "I've done that before; I know where it leads to; I'm not going to do that again; what's the point? It doesn't lead to anywhere at all". And then when you get into the habit of feeling as happy and harmless as is humanly possible that, in combination with sensuosity (which is becoming more and more aware of the flowers and the trees and the stars and the clouds and the rivers and the mountains and anything at all) can lead to a state of wide-eyed wonder, which brings it back to naivete which is the nearest thing you can get to being innocent whilst still being a self. And then, something can happen. There’s always the possibility that some kind of experience can happen - be it an Excellence Experience or a Pure Consciousness Experience. And then, finally, the feelings are gone. But then “you” have disappeared as well.

    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