Has anybody here struggled with anhedonia?

[xise]

I try not to judge the activities that bring me pleasure or artificially follow a ruleset, except in that to make sure I cause no harm to others and try to cause no harm to myself.

I think finding enjoyment in life is very important and a strong tool against depression, even if that enjoyment is borderline distraction in the past, it's helped me get through some rough spots. As long as you are also working upon the self-daily, I think it's ok to have 'wasted' time spending on pure fun. I think its sometimes more humble to accept our current stage of development where we are not super discipled and still need a certain amount of enjoyment and indeed plan on doing daily self-work as well as enjoyable activities.

After all, when you start the spiritual path, much work is to be done, and it's good to accept that it will take real work and not change overnight, and to build a practice that is sustainable for you. If you go from spending 5 hours a day on enjoyable but distracting activities to 0 hours and 5 hours of meditation, and that doesn't feel comfortable for you, I think that is your self telling you that you need to do things a bit more gradually. A sustainable practice, which you constantly increase over time, I think is very important, because the amazing changes often take years, so this thing is often a marathon, and you want to do it for long haul. It can be still useful to experiment with drastic retreat-level work for days or weeks on end, but ultimately you gotta find a sustainable way to evolve if you wanna do this for years, and I think for most people that involves a non-hermit like existence in terms of pleasurable activities.

18.5 ▶ Questioner: Thank you. I have a question here from Jim that I will read verbatim: “Much of the mystic tradition of seeking on Earth holds that belief that the individual self must be erased or obliterated and the material world ignored for an entity to reach ‘nirvana,’ as it’s called, or enlightenment. What is the proper role of the individual self and its worldly activities in aiding an entity to grow more into the Law of One?”
Ra: I am Ra. The proper role of the entity is in this density to experience all things desired, to then analyze, understand, and accept these experiences, distilling from them the love/light within them. Nothing shall be overcome. That which is not needed falls away.

The orientation develops due to analysis of desire. These desires become more and more distorted towards conscious application of love/light as the entity furnishes itself with distilled experience. We have found it to be inappropriate in the extreme to encourage the overcoming of any desires, except to suggest the imagination rather than the carrying out in the physical plane, as you call it, of those desires not consonant with the Law of One; this preserving the primal distortion of free will.

The reason it is unwise to overcome is that overcoming is an unbalanced action creating difficulties in balancing in the time/space continuum. Overcoming thus creates the further environment for holding onto that which apparently has been overcome.

All things are acceptable in the proper time for each entity, and in experiencing, in understanding, in accepting, in then sharing with other-selves, the appropriate description shall be moving away from distortions of one kind to distortions of another which may be more consonant with the Law of One.

It is, shall we say, a shortcut to simply ignore or overcome any desire. It must instead be understood and accepted. This takes patience and experience which can be analyzed with care, with compassion for self and for other-self.

It is fair to note that Ra talks about desire in a very different way from other spiritual practices. So there are many different philosophies about how to eventually reach the state where desires, even desire for pleasure, no longer hold sway. I'm always a big proponent of reaching things organically instead of following rules on conduct - though even in my suggestions you need rules/discipline in setting aside some amount of time each day for meditation and analysis of desires as described by Ra. So it's a tricky subject, this concept of discipline, but I feel discipline applies to making sure you reserve time each day for seeking, as oppose to controlling your conduct each and every moment.