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.…
Read More
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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
(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…
Read More
The Introverted Tree 