I have often wondered about Odysseus’ last words to Penelope before he left for Troy. How would the ultimate hero say farewell, how to explain the necessity to leave? It may be easier to use the excuse of duty than to explain the powerful attraction of the other side of the world, calling his name.…
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I love routine because it makes me feel safe. Life should be in order, so that I can predict what is going to happen at any time. Yet, an admonitory voice inside warned me: “Stop presuming you know what life should be like, just not to be in fear.” Fear of the unknown, I guessed.…
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I am looking at old pictures. I see the child I was. I look at him in the picture and I perceive him as a separate person, i.e., not me. However, when I evoke the emotions and sensations that I felt back then, stored on one of those shelves in my memory, it feels immediate,…
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Prompted by this excellent post by Andrew (thank you!), I read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The book navigates a succession of inner thoughts, feelings, states of mind in six disparate characters described with empathic but also stark accuracy, sometimes using mental images that may seem unrelated to a situation, but which provide such a precise…
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Projections are my favourite psychological phenomenon. The transfer of part of our unconscious content to another being. That transfer of energy occurs from one part of our mind to another part of our mind. It is not really externalised. The external ‘hook’ does not demand projection, it mostly remains unaware. The part of our mind…
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It seems to me that most gods in the different mythologies are quite childish. If they don’t get their way, they release their wrath. I am guessing they never got ‘no’ for an answer. What did they want all that power for? They were bored and lacked a purpose. I wonder if they created men…
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We spend our lives asking ourselves who we are while, at the same time, we try to become someone else through every single action that moves us from here to there, as if ‘there’ were any different from ‘here’. Asking myself who I am used to lead me to a brick wall that seemed to…
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Ask yourself, “What is the real motive behind everything I do, think, want?” You’ll see that your real desire is to be desireless. Your real desire is peace. Jean Klein, The Ease of Being The main aim of each want is to end the want itself. To be desireless, as Klein says. Once we get…
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One of the most repeated sentences in my school was “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”. As a child I always thought the difficult part was to love others, taking for granted that I would always love myself. With time I realised that loving oneself was the toughest half of the sentence and an…
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There was a moment a few years ago when I stopped defending from the world. When I understood my aim was not to look for a more appropriate place, different from this one, but to fuse myself with this world to which I belong. To be one with it, accepting life as a permanently changing…
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(Spoiler alert: do not continue reading if you plan to read the book) In my youth, after reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Demian and Siddhartha, which I loved, I enthusiastically started The Glass Bead Game. I found it incredibly slow and boring. I made two new attempts later, still boring. After re-reading those three books again…
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In the old days, ideas were regarded to be in an ethereal cloud. Having an idea, being inspired, would be experienced as if one of those drops in the cloud was passing through us. We wouldn’t be the source of the idea, but the channel. How often do we wonder where this or that idea…
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I have a mug on my desk with blue stars on it. Each star occupies an empty blank space in the shape of a star. Some blank spaces lack their star. I had this silly feeling that those spots had not yet found their match. But then I saw them for what they really are:…
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I’m a CreepI’m a weirdoWhat the hell am I doin’ hereI don’t belong here Radiohead, Creep For many years I felt like this, in a life that now seems a million years ago, as if I were someone else back then. I felt different from ‘the others’, I wouldn’t fit. I reached the conclusion that…
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We spend most of our life searching, trying to fill the void we are born with. The original sin of the separation of our conscious and unconscious minds. We enter the labyrinth of the million corners, lanes, and fake lights. Just some sugar to get us going until our next ‘discovery’. To no avail. Why…
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In the old days we didn’t have so much information at hand. It was easier to have an opinion that was not necessarily supported by facts. It was the opinion we wanted to have, or rather the one we needed to have at the time. Now, with everything there is to know in our cell…
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Reading Hesse’s Siddhartha again, I realised that I read books as I look at a river. I read and read until I find a sentence, a paragraph that resonates with me. Then I stop. I wonder why my mind focused my intention on that idea. I immediately discard it… ‘No, that cannot be me’. But…
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I sometimes have the feeling that I talk and discuss ‘the Search’ more than I actually search. As if I were discussing the pros and cons of each strategy to climb the Everest without actually taking a step up. Or maybe the Matterhorn. After all, I’m an introvert and I wouldn’t like to find myself…
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I read that our education strengthens the mind’s duality and the central position of the ego, the ‘I’. Where does this trend come from? Yes, it perpetuates the alienation, but where does it come from? It did not originate in our educational system. It must have arisen earlier in response to the development of our…
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Called by another life, the life in which we were… us. It knocks at our door, timidly, almost hopelessly. In the vain expectation that we might remember who we were. Almost as if it were reluctant to burst our bubble, knowing how much it would hurt. It sees us from the other side. Loving us,…
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The Introverted Tree 