Sincere awareness

Glossary

For the record

Sincere awareness is what I do in place of the actualism method. I pay attention to what is going on in me and I do not lie about what I find. There is no checklist and no nomenclature. In January I discarded the framework and started from this instead, and I regard replacing the method as a refinement of the method.

The method, as Richard sets it out, is a tidy set of steps, with the feelings sorted into a nomenclature like a stamp collection. I do not do that. I do not run the steps. I have kept the word "method" for the thing I do instead of the method.

The sincere part does the load-bearing work. Sincerity, on Richard's reading, is the key that unlocks naivete, so I keep myself honest and whatever is really going on gets teased out rather than filed under something more flattering. I have named my practice after honesty, which I find settles most questions about whether it is working.

I should be exact about what discarding the framework involved. I stopped practising the actualism method in January. I no longer read AFT out of habit, though I read it sometimes. I have stopped doing the defined practice and continued describing myself as a practitioner of it, and I see these as compatible.

The forum says that dropping the framework is exactly how I drifted off-method.¹ I have read this. I dropped the framework on purpose and I feel good, so I do not see the drift. I have appointed my mood the judge of whether I have wandered, and my mood reports that I have not.

Claudiu, on the journal as a whole:

Claudiu · forum
"each individual component is also going in the wrong direction," and engaging it only makes things "spawn off even more fractally-misdirected offshoots."

The component here is steering by my own sense of what is honest rather than by the method. He says it goes the wrong way. I have read this, and I take the test to be whether I keep feeling good, which I pass daily — using the very instrument whose reliability is in question.

Mentioned in

#3 — I Threw Out the Framework in January and I'm Fine
… the actualism framework and stopped using Richard's feeling-names. I do not practise the method. I also dropped actual freedom and PCEs as goals and stopped caring about them. I feel good anyway. I am reco …
#2 — Picking the Journal Back Up
… kipped what actually helped me get here, so I am recording it for posterity. What helped: Sincere awareness — paying attention and not lying to myself, which is what I now do instead of the method. Catching myself pla …