03-01 Do we know how to think?
Do we know how to think? Everyone is sure that knows how to think, knows how to form an opinion. He or she is also sure that he or she thinks often and that almost every his or her thought is “thinking”, reasoning. You are also sure of it. But this assurance is deeply erroneous and leads to unfortunate consequences.
Let’s determine what is “thinking” at first. It is really very simple. Let’s say you want to make a decision in a situation – what to do. For this, you sit down, write out all the options that seem the most reasonable to you. Then you write out all the pros and cons of each solution and then you ask yourself – which option assumes more pros? If you use Selection of perceptions, you will ask yourself another second question: which option gives you the greatest anticipation?
And do you often do like this? Of the thousands of more or less important decisions made, how many times have you done this? I think, two or three times, or none.
Now, let’s say you were asked to create an opinion on some issue, for example: do you agree that people have a legal right to openly and publicly have sex. If you want to form an opinion on some issue, what is it reasonable to do? Firstly, to collect information from sources that you believe for some reason or other to be reliable. Secondly, analyze this information, contrast it. Then, based on both processed information and your personal experience you make up some reasoned opinion – you are “for” or “against” it.
Do you often do this? I think very rarely. Or even never. To answer the question asked about public sex, will you do this? I think no. How then will you create your opinion? It is very simple – on the basis of a) an emotional reaction and b) repeating someone’s authoritative opinion.
There are two simple criteria for the fact that a person actually created his own reasoned opinion – an opinion as a result of reasoning:
a) before answering, a person will say “I need to think”. When was the last time you heard this phrase from someone? Personally I hear it very rarely. Have you ever been surprised that people always have a ready opinion on almost any issue? Did they spend so much time to think about everything? No, on the contrary, they do not have the habit of thinking and that is why they do not need reasoning.
b) he or she will spend a certain amount of time, more or less significant, on reasoning
c) when he or she finally expresses his or her opinion, he or she will necessarily (!) want to tell you about why he or she came to such an opinion, which train of thought he or she had, which the most significant arguments for and against he or she has considered, just because it is interesting, nice to tell you about it. Well, if you ask him the question “why do you think so”, he will tell you about the progress of his reasoning with particular pleasure and thoroughness. Reasoning is pleasant, it gives pleasure and it will be pleasant for him to share his pleasure with you. And vice versa – if a person expressed an opinion rashly but under the influence of emotions or authorities, as it almost always happens, then in response to the question “why did you come to this opinion” in spite of all the diversity of personalities of people, almost everyone will experience a clearly visible surge of irritation, discontent.
You can conduct as many experiments of this kind as you want and discover that people never think. And after that, perhaps, you will have enough sincerity to admit that this also applies to you.
It is an amazing situation. On the one hand, we are sure that we are rationale people, that is, in our lives, the mind, reasonable and consistent thinking plays a rightful role. On the other hand, this is completely wrong. And this leads to very sad consequences. Imagine that a sick person takes instead of a medicine some kind of pacifier by mistake. If his condition does not improve, if his health gets worse and worse, then everyone will advise him to take the medicine, and he understands perfectly that once the body cannot fight it itself, medication support is needed. But he is already sure that he is doing it! So, he comes to the conclusion that drugs do not help either. The same is with the mind. People in their actions are almost never guided by common sense and moreover – they never use it at all, and therefore they are sure that the misfortunes they face are inevitable, then the mind will not help, because they already “apply” it. Thus, this self-deception leads to the fact that people do not even try to use common sense to solve their problems. Unhappy, they rush between decisions motivated by emotions and decisions motivated by dogmas, and finding no way out, they are assured that there is no way out and cannot be. In their thinking there is chaos, sheer contradictions and inconsistencies and gradually they are assured that there is no other way, being skeptic, and, eventually, refusing even attempts to think independently.
Sometimes it seems that people think at least at work. Otherwise, how could our world, based on technology, exist? But it is not so as well. Even in the work of scientists, where it would seem that you can’t take a single step without reasoning, people think extremely little, simply following the established rules, algorithms. In fact, at work, people often follow instructions that someone once did thinking well an other than that they do exactly the same as in everyday life – following emotions and dogmas.
So the answer to the question “do we know how to think” is: we know how. But we do not use this skill almost anywhere except at work and even there we hardly use it. And in vain.
And they do not teach to think in schools.
03-02 Adjusting of the opinion
Another sign of a thinking person is that such person corrects his or her opinions from time to time and even completely changes them sometimes. This is an absolutely inevitable process. We can never have completeness of information on all the issues. Life constantly brings new information that can supplement what is already available and sometimes refute it, and this applies to absolutely all the areas – astronomy, genetics, physics, pharmacology, physiology, economics, etc.
The same goes for simple everyday situations in which we constantly create some opinions. To express your opinion once and then stand on it at any cost – this is considered almost a sign of a strong, intelligent person, but is it so? This is a sign not of a clever but of a dogmatic and proud person who rejects all the incoming information and treats his or her opinion as an overvalue that he or she must protect henceforth. This position is simply dangerous because it makes a person unable to adapt to changing external conditions.
03-03 What is dogmatism?
What do I mean when I talk about dogmatism? Dogma is a mechanically adopted set of opinions concerning which a person refuses to carry out any analysis, aggressively defending it from any attempt to analyze, from any constructive criticism. “Mechanically adopted” means adopted by blind imitation, thoughtlessly, without own reasoning, without own search of the grounds in the form of experimental data or under the influence of NE (e.g. SGS, awkwardness, fear of negative attitude towards oneself, fear of isolation, etc.). That is, any statement is accepted on the faith and then the person lives as if it is absolutely true.
In this description it is easy to recognize many people you know, isn’t it? But do you recognize yourself in this? :)
Mechanically adopted opinion is not a dogma by itself. It becomes a dogma precisely when a person begins to aggressively defend this opinion from any constructive criticism, from adjustments, for which it is necessary to displace facts, suppress logic, suppress and even hate the very source of criticism.
It must be understood that this mechanical, imitative way of poaching opinions is inevitable in human development! After all, from the earliest childhood and further, as a person grows up, as the sphere of his or her contact with the surrounding world grows, he or she faces a huge number of various phenomena that he or she is absolutely incapable of analyzing himself because of the lack of experience in thinking, and most importantly – due to the lack of life experience that he or she can rely on. The only adequate approach effective in this case is the mechanical adoption of the opinions of those people whom he or she trusts. And it is necessary to do this as soon as possible in order to adapt as soon as possible to new challenges. And here a person imperceptibly develops an amazing ability – the ability to control assurances.
The fact is that the more firmly you are sure of the unconditional justice of the certain views, the sooner you will react to emerging circumstances in accordance with these views. Hence it is clear that a person should not simply “adopt the views” but more than that – he or she must believe in them with almost religious faith. He or she must create and strengthen in him or herself an unshakable assurance in the justice of the opinions he or she is offered to poach. Anyone who does not succeed in this will begin to lose to those who will quickly learn it – simply because a fully convinced person acts faster, more whole and more consistent than the one who doubts or is not completely sure.
Furthermore. What do parents teach children in the first months or years? The simplest everyday behavioral skills that, of course, guarantee the child the opportunity to make expedient actions and quickly get results. If you want to eat – open the fridge, open yogurt, take a spoon. A child who adopts a lot of this kind of household skills from his parents starts to sincerely believe in their infallibility in everything and everywhere. The parents and teachers in general are turning into sources of infallible knowledge. That is why children are so hard going through situations in which their parents show lies, insincerity, weakness, stupidity. That is why children with foam at the mouth will defend any foolishness and stupidity of the parents in spite of any common sense, contrary to any most obvious violence that the same parents are doing so often over the same children. And that is why when and if in the end the cumulative weight of unpleasant, stupid, aggressive manifestations of the parents crosses a certain border, then there comes a total breakdown of confidence in them and children rush to the other extreme – total rejection of their parents. The gods fallen to the ground are zealously trampled down in the dirt because in the eyes of the believer they are traitors, impostors that offended the religious feelings.
Thus, one can, of course, be sad about the fact that all the children from the very early age grow religious fanatics in fact but it must be understood that this is an inevitable and even necessary stage of their maturation that, however, can be successfully and almost painlessly overcome.
03-04 Speed of affirming dogmas
Imagine that the mother catching her child playing with his penis expresses disgust all in wrinkles, or outrage, or aggression. The child seeing the bright emotional reaction of a person authoritative for him adopts not only the emotional colour of this reaction but also adjusts his world view so that this emotional reaction turns out to be fair. At this very moment the child instantly accepts the truth that his penis is bad and playing with it is very bad. The speed with which these dogmas are adopted by the child is truly fantastic, incredible. Children incredibly quickly adopt everything from their parents and other people who are authoritative for them. It is enough that the story I described happened only once! And after a few seconds, the child’s shame and fear lead to the assurance corresponding to this new dogma is firmly established. After that, you can discuss this topic with the child as much as you want, as convincingly as possible, you can prove to him that there is nothing shameful in masturbation – it is useless. Here a kind of “dogmatic imprinting” works: the very first dogma in this semantic niche is fixed there incredibly firmly. In the vast majority of cases it is forever.
Furthermore, the attempts of the surrounding people to destroy this assurance from this very moment are perceived by a person as acts of aggression directed against him personally, to the destruction of his world. Only an extremely delicate, extremely cautious approach can lead to doubts in a person in this original dogma.
There are only two ways to subsequently weaken this monstrous power of imprinted assurance:
*) mass and long-standing behaviour of surrounding people contrary to this dogma. In this case, a person begins to doubt the validity of his dogma when he sees that hundreds, thousands of people daily act against his blind assurance. This can happen when moving from one country to another. For example, a woman who moved from Saudi Arabia, Somalia or Brunei to Europe may begin to feel doubts that a public exposure of the knees should in fact be punished with stoning to death.
*) a long manifestation of sincerity (including motivated by an extremely delicate “undermining” of a close person under the dogma). If a person doubts his dogma and tries to understand this question by his own efforts, then a high degree of sincerity, the application of logic and common sense can weaken the initial blind assurance that feeds a certain dogma.
The complete release of any dogma in any case requires a high degree of sincerity, determination to achieve clarity and is usually accompanied by bright, unforgettable bursts of ecstasy, happiness from experiencing a new degree of freedom.
From this fact of swift adoption of dogmas there follows a mass of extremely curious and acute conclusions and questions, including the rationality of the almost absolute and exclusive right of the parents to control communication with the child they gave birth to, irrespective of the personal characteristics of these parents.
03-05 Mechanisms of adopting dogmas
I will list the main mechanisms by which people adopt dogmas from each other.
*) “emotional” – it is described in the previous section and is especially active in early childhood, gradually giving leadership to other mechanisms
*) “authoritarian”. If someone “respectable” or “senior” or “smart” important-looking asserts something categorically, then a person accustomed to dogmatism often blindly takes this statement for granted because such a “smart” and “respectable” person cannot talk nonsense.
*) “mimic”. Once in a certain community, a person instinctively tries not to be an outcast, not to cause group neglect or condemnation. Therefore, he often unwittingly makes one concession after another in his views motivating it for himself by considerations of security and expediency. But, surprisingly, even the limited conciliation and even a tacit absence of objections inexorably leads to the fact that a person begins to share the dogmas of this community. It seems to me that the significance of this phenomenon is greatly underestimated, since the false belief is widely spread that if I just did not say anything, did not express my disagreement with the group dogma, the group morality, it means that I still remained of the same mind – I simply do not show my disagreement off. This is completely wrong. Over-compromising and the position of disagreement non-expression very quickly lead to the complete adoption of the group dogmas and the group system of values. In conditions of mass distribution of the position of silent disagreement non-expression, it is extremely important to understand this. Otherwise, at the moments of sincerity awakening you can find yourself in an extremely unpleasant situation discovering that you are committing actions immoral from your point of view and have turned into something very unpleasant to yourself and people you like long time ago.
*) “threatening”. If a person is threatened and insulted, he can adopt the dogmas imposed on him simply in order to facilitate his life, so that the violence against him ceases. This situation often occurs in the communication of parents and children, as well as in communities with a rigid hierarchy and brutal methods of social struggle.
*) “stupid”. A person who does not like and does not want to reason, nonetheless feels the need to have certain assurances about various aspects of the surrounding world, as this either gives him confidence in safety or increases his sense of self-importance and status. In this case, any information he receives immediately forms a dogma. For such person it is enough to read an article about the Earth flying to the celestial axis and he is already firmly convinced in dozens of different absurd things.
*) “defensive-stultifying”. A man strives to defend his dogmas with all his might to maintain his world view but this is often possible only when he displays gross insincerity, forcing out many facts or overinterpreting non-existent ones, accepting new dogmas serving as a “prop” for the available ones. For reasoning, typical of the new dogma creation from such motivation, insane leaps in reasoning are characteristic with the help of the phrases “it is obvious that…”, “everyone knows that…”, “the scientists have long discovered that…” (of course, there are no specific references to concrete statements of scientists, comparisons with other opinions), etc.
03-06 Implicit dogmas
Among the dogmas explicit and implicit ones can be identified. I call explicit dogmas those that are fully realized by their carrier: he can easily formulate their meaning, tells about them to other people, etc. Usually, when people talk about dogmatism, they mean explicit dogmas.
However, there is another class of dogmas – the class of “implicit dogmas” that is often even more extensive than the first one. A characteristic feature of the implicit dogmas is that a person does not realize that he shares them, does not formulate them, or expresses them aloud, yet these dogmas still have a tremendous influence on his perceptions and his motives by choosing those or other actions.
If you ask a person whether it is possible to stop experiencing NE, he will certainly say “no” but that does not mean that he has ever thought about it, examined someone’s arguments or evidence, tried to make efforts and got his experience in this area. Such thoughts simply did not occur to him and before he was asked this question, he did not know at all he would answer in this way. He did not know that he had such a conviction and the corresponding assurance. And if he was offered to enumerate his ideas about the world in an explicit form, then this dogma about the impossibility of stopping experiencing NE would not even appear on his list.
Any dogma is a verbal expression of a certain “blind assurance”. Usually this verbal expression carries the character of a completed thought: “to cheat on the husband is bad”, “to upset the mother not obeying to her is bad”. The implicit dogma is also an expression of blind assurance but for various reasons this does not have the nature of a clearly formulated thought, point of view but manifests in the form of jerky, incoherent scraps of thoughts.
This has several consequences:
*) when a person comes to an unsatisfactory state as a result of his actions, he cannot understand that the reason for this was the blind assurance that underlies the corresponding implicit dogma. For example, a mother requires her daughter to come home until nine in the evening. The daughter obeys and feels poisoned, crushed. The next time she does not obey… with the same exact result! For the first time she suppressed her JW, hence the feeling of crushing. The second time she did as she wanted but at the same time she went against the blind dogma “not to obey my mother and upset her in such a way – it is bad” and hence a sense of guilt, shame, self-flagellation. That is how the vital position is developed in people: “do as you want, still you will regret it”.
Fighting with the implicit dogmas is especially difficult because before they can be combated, they must first be identified. But still this complexity is not insurmountable. The implicit dogmas can be found in oneself one after another. At first, the easiest way to do this is reading books interesting for you, communicating with people interesting for you, encountering new ideas, unexpected points of view. It is not necessary to find and eliminate all the implicit dogmas at once, immediately. It is also effective to move step by step. With every new implicit dogma discovered and eliminated, the total stock of blind assurances, the whole multitude of dogmatic beliefs becomes more attackable to common sense and sincerity, and the process of this gradual progress toward clarity is terribly interesting.
03-07 Mirror method of working with dogmas
Some dogmas seem obviously meaningless and the blind assurance that they are righteous, can, nonetheless, remain. If a girl considered herself to be ugly for a long time, even when she changed her mind as a result of the fact that the boys began to fall in love with her, and also as a result of a sober assessment of her appearance, the blind assurance can still remain for a long time causing an inappropriate and unexpected sense of self-inferiority.
If a person, under the influence of arguments, agreed that the existence of a certain entity indicated by three letters “g o d” is not confirmed by anything, then for a long time there may remain a blind assurance in him causing specific anxiety from the coming hell and other kinds of sadistic punishments as described in detail in the “sacred” texts.
It is necessary to be conscious of this and, if desired, continue to weaken own blind assurances.
As one of the ways to achieve this goal, I propose the “mirror method”. This is very easy. Suppose I formulated the dogma: “God exists”. Now I formulate the statement opposite to it in the sense: “There is no god”. This statement can be designated as “anti-dogma”. Is there any way to prove one of these phrases? No. They are completely equal because you simply do not have an idea of what these three letters stand for. That is, you can say anything with the word “god” and there is not the slightest way to substantiate or even understand any of these statements – simply because of the fact that it is unclear what is being referred. Hence, it is clear that any of these statements is meaningless.
This approach can be used including to such dogmas that operate with seemingly understandable words like “good” and “bad”. For example: “masturbating is bad”. You form an anti-dogma: “masturbating is good”. How to prove this or that statement? In no way, and for the same reason the words “bad” and “good” do not, in fact, make any sense, except for expressing a personal negative or positive attitude. Refusing both mirror statements due to the impossibility to prove any of them, you formulate something completely different, understandable, for example: “it is nice to masturbate and I will do it”.
The same applies to the words “must” and “must not” because these words are also just labels that everyone puts where they want. Try to substitute something that makes sense for the word “must”, for example: “it is reasonable” and the phrase “one must get out of bed immediately after awakening” turns into “it is reasonable to get out of bed immediately after awakening”, it is quite another matter! It is quite different because the questions are immediately raised – “what is this reason”, “by whom it is set”, “do I need this reason”, “why is this action considered reasonable to achieve this goal”, etc.
The word “must” can also be changed to “efficient” and all the same questions arise: “how do we know that it is efficient”, “efficient for achieving what goal”, “who set this goal”, etc.
As a result, the management of one’s life arises on the basis of common sense, JW, understanding of one’s needs.
Sometimes the release of dogma occurs spontaneously as a result of the life experience accumulation. You can live and communicate with your relatives for thirty years because “that’s how you do it”, “it’s customary”, and not with those with whom you really want it. For thirty years you can greet neighbours, keep talking about weather and work because “it’s embarrassing to refuse”. And at some point the poisoning of this lie, of the eternal fear of negative attitude towards oneself becomes so obvious, the crisis is passing its peak, so that it will be enough just to catch a glimpse of the anti-dogma and the abscess will break through with clarity: “You can live in a different way! You don’t have to force yourself to communicate with those whom you don’t like to communicate with!” The avalanche rushes down.
How often do words – meaningless or simply vague, understood by each in its own way – occur in our speech? Too often. “Eternity”, “decency”, “good”, “morally”, “cosmic order”, “justice”, “god”, “conscience” are closely intermixed with words denoting completely concrete perceptions, prohibitions and motivations. For example, “if I have a conscience, I could not refuse this person”. What is “conscience” is not clear to anyone and what is “cannot refuse” is very clear, and as a result we see a person who is engaged in self-abuse, destruction of his life richness, his JW suppression because of meaningless dogmatic constructions taken on faith.
What a huge number of everyday dogmas affect our life destroying the pleasure from it step by step? “Linens in the closet should be clean”, “it is forbidden to eat on the floor”, “we have to get up early in the morning and do not lazy about in bed late”, “it is definitely needed to work and earn more money”, “it is necessary to respect the elders”, “need to save money”, “it is necessary to take care of the things”, “it is needed to have a clear goal in life and pursue it”, “it is necessary to complete any begun business”, “I should call my mother”, “I should eat the soup first and then the main course”, “I should be a lawyer”, “I should not sit around”, “I have to talk”, “it is time to have kids”, “it is time to get married”, and so on and so forth – dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of different regulations severely restricting our life by lack of freedom.
Behind all these regulations and rules the main thing is lost – the pleasure of life. A person, in fact, he for all his life dreams “to live for himself” someday but it never happens in itself. Changes, if they occur in such person’s life, do not alter anything in this joylessness and do not cause anticipation because they are not caused by JW but by mechanical wishes, that is, motivated by some or other dogmas. In fact, a person moves from cell to cell, replacing one way of life, unpleasant and maybe even painful, to another one, the same. We can fully apply the advice to such people: “do whatever you want, you will regret it all the same”.
To get out of this vicious circle you will have to fight, first of all, with ourselves, with our dogmas.
The dogmas force a person to spin constantly in the wheel of far-fetched deeds and duties, and there comes a point when free time becomes already burdensome because it means a painful encounter with the problem of “what to do”, “why my life is so empty”, so a spasmodic search for something you can “kill time” with. And if a person remains out of activity for a while, then he feels how the world around him rushes somewhere, he feels as if he is on the sidelines, he jumps to the first saddle and comes after. So they rush, and the dust they have raised will now be whipped out and then settle.
03-08 Intellectual pleasure
We are all used to phrases like “intellectual pleasure”, “intellectual enjoyment” and we understand them, of course, in a kind of figurative sense – not at all like we understand, for example, the enjoyment of food or sex. And it is absolutely in vain.
Of course, there is a kind of specific intellectual pleasure that you experience when reading a beautiful thought, dealing a beautiful challenge. The word “beautiful” here is understood, again, in a specific sense – “intellectually beautiful” and not as beautiful as a beautiful girl.
Meanwhile, by achieving rational clarity in something, and, especially, seeking liberation from any dogma, a person can experience the most real enjoyment – the enjoyment in the body, just as when having sex. This seems absolutely amazing and even mystical, but, nevertheless, it is an indisputable fact in the justness of which absolutely everyone can be convinced by their experience. The enjoyment is experienced not in the genitals, as by having sex, but in the heart, in the center of the chest and in the throat, nevertheless, I would not draw a sharp line between these two kinds of enjoyments as experiencing enjoyment from clarity, that it is exactly the same as we sometimes manage to experience during sex, caresses, especially accompanied by a vivid experience of tenderness, love, openness.
This discovery confirms that both sex and the experience of enlightened perceptions and the liberation from dogmas and the achievement of rational clarity – all are equal participants in the evolution of man, the movement of man to development, to the expansion of the spectrum of the attractive perceptions.
03-09 Differentiation of achievement of clarity and change of dogmas
It is necessary to carefully delineate the attainment of clarity and the change of dogmas. If a person converted from Judaism to Christianity – does this mean that he is freed from dogmas? If a former communist becomes a Christian? If a Christian becomes a communist?
A person today can earnestly believe that cholesterol is bad for health, and tomorrow, just as earnestly, he can believe in the opposite. The change of dogmas and the whole dogmatic systems is common, but all this has nothing to do with the achievement of rational clarity, common sense and sober thinking. The change of point of view occurs as a result of reflection and not as a result of the willful act of changing one dogma to another.
A person who has achieved clarity and has replaced dogma with one or another point of view is perfectly aware of the following:
1. he understands: what arguments led to the fact that he now has this point of view
2. he understands that his point of view may well change in the future if he discovers new facts relevant to the issue under consideration or new considerations that allow him to take a different look at the facts
3. telling about his point of view, he does not present it as truth, but shows it precisely as a result of reflections resting on some or other grounds in the form of a) facts observed directly by him, b) evidence of observations originating from sources that he considers authoritative and c) logical judgments.
(Reliance on authoritative sources is often necessary since each individual is unable to conduct, for example, experiments on a nuclear reactor and he is forced to trust the reports of the results of such experiments verified by the scientific communities, being aware that scientists may be mistaken, something not taken into account, and that science is constantly moving forward).
4. faced with the need to reconsider his point of view, such person does not panic or indifferently negate. Moreover, most often such person will experience pleasure, a sense of secrecy, anticipation, and, taking into account the new factors, will correct his point of view or even completely change it, or justifiably keep it unchanged.
03-10 Dogmatic interpretations
The interpretation can also be dogmatic. The same situation different people interpret in different ways. Roughly speaking, one sees a glass half empty and the other half full. In real life, the differences in the interpretation of the same phenomena go very, very far, up to irreconcilable contradictions. Some see an inoffensive caricature in the drawing and others – an insult which can be washed away only by blood. The husband sees in kisses with the girlfriend the lovely flirtation and friendliness and his wife – a mean cheating.
Dogmatism as a way to build one’s own picture of the world causes all these contradictions to arise in interpretations, thus creating an endless enmity and inability to cooperate, to a peaceful and creative coexistence.
A person who has a dogmatic interpretation does not understand this. It seems to him that he sees “how it really is”. “The husband is kissing with another girl – what is there to reason about?” his wife will exclaim. She is sure that she sees not a kiss, but the cheating. The interpretations substitute reality for themselves, they become reality on their own which makes the process of liberation from under their blind power very difficult. A man tenderly embraced the child and the eyes of others are presented with a picture of pedophilic rape. The child refuses to eat – the mother sees a child’s life-threatening exhaustion. The artist painted a funny picture – a believer sees an act of vandalism, blasphemy which deserves criminal prosecution or even death.
We will not exaggerate greatly if we say that people never (!) live in the real world. The whole life of a person passes as if in a computer game – amidst the unhealthy and unskilled consciousness of phantoms, among which it is meaningless to look for some patterns and common sense. The phantoms, unlike real matter, are not subject to any physical and social laws – they are completely chaotic and this chaos inspires people with a feeling of deep anxiety, a feeling of total inability to understand the world around, the inability to make their life happier. How little one needs to be done to become the master of one’s life – is just to get rid of blind, dogmatic interpretations and capture the happening phenomena as they are! But how difficult it is to make this simple step we see by that insignificant number of people who wanted to do it and, moreover, did it. After all, if a husband “seeing the cheating” would stop and asked his wife why she kisses the other guy, what she feels for him and for that guy, then maybe the reason for the conflict would not even have appeared! The kiss would turn from “cheating” into what it is – just a kiss for the sake of a small erotic adventure that by no means cool the wife’s affection for her husband, but rather strengthens it adding to their relationship an additional depth of events and feelings.
And in fact it is easy to stop this flow of mechanical interpretations. Also it’s easy to want it. It is difficult to stop the flow of NE that break out immediately following this interpretation and destroy any sanity, any good intentions on their way. At least to weaken its addiction to NE is a task of exceptional importance, without which it is impossible to get out of the morass of emptiness, destructiveness and painfulness of life.
03-11 Drawings and extrusion
One of the most significant dogmatic interpretations in our life is the interpretation of the character of a person, his personal qualities. This is done with the help of interpretations and repressions.
If I see a girl with a beautiful body, with a doll’s face, I automatically start assuming in her perceptions sympathetic to me. It is nice to imagine that this girl will turn out to be a pretty person. In my future communication with her I begin to carefully circumvent acute angles – I gradually agree not to raise those topics to which she reacts inadequately, I look for positive interpretations of her unattractive actions. If she shows aggression, I express it in streamlined phrases like “she broke away”. If she shows stupidity: “she is jammed, it happens to everyone”.
As a result, the image of this girl is formed completely detached from reality. The closer our relations with her are, the more painful it will be for me to achieve sobriety. If such a girl became your wife, then imagine what a huge change will happen in your life, if you start to soberly understand what kind of person she is! Such changes frighten, therefore usually people choose to block their common sense and sincerity which leads to inevitable and dramatic consequences: general stupor, loss of JW, accumulation of NB from communicating with an unpleasant person, as well as to the formation of hatred towards life, to pleasures, to those people who are trying to live sincerely and strive for happiness.
In my opinion such a “pupation” in insincerity is tantamount to suicide. Of course, after a sincere recapitulation of your relationships with people, a stage of more or less significant shocks and problems will inevitably come, but is this price too high for once again getting the opportunity to build your life on the principles of striving for pleasure, richness, communication with people that are close to you?
We do not communicate with any person as with a real creature. We interpret each in one or another direction, more or less, after which we communicate with this fictional image. And, surprisingly, first of all it refers to those whom we “know” the longest. A variety of problems arise around these phantoms, including painful attachment, jealousy, resentment, the bitterness of unjustified expectations and shame for allegedly unjustified hopes. A whole swarm of obsessive thoughts can painfully trouble you for years and decades making you mentally justify, argue, explain, and there will be no end to it until the fictitious image completed with conjectures is replaced by a clear and reasonable picture, until there is a sober attitude to this person based on facts, on the analysis of his manifestations.
Clarity is healing while self-deception is a frequent cause of neuroses and a disastrous split in your own personality.
An exceptionally effective, unrivaled way to identify and eliminate the interpretations is the “interviewing”. Make a list of questions the answers to which are important to you to understand any person. What does he dream about, what he thinks about, how he relates to this or that point in the Bodh Declaration and something else, how he would act in this or that situation, what books he reads, what he creates and so on. In what form and to what extent to ask him these questions – this you need to decide by yourself so as not to alienate, scare or alert him. As you get answers, ask additional questions for clarification, you get answers again and analyze them, clarity arises, a relationship based on something concrete arises. In the process of such study you can learn a person better in one hour than during the years of living together.
And you will inevitably get an amazing experience that the more justified your attitude towards a person, the less painful your relationship with him is. The mechanism of this phenomenon is simple and you will easily understand it by yourself (for example, there is no sense of loss when you realize that there was nothing to lose, etc.)
03-12 Boundaries of competence and follow-up of JW
Trying to reason with one or another question, you will sooner or later come across the limits of your competence. Each of us faced this many times and remained with a bitter admixture of disappointment in the powerlessness of one’s mind to answer the burning questions not only of the universe, but even of one’s own elementary domestic life, the questions of your personal interaction with people.
Meanwhile, there is absolutely nothing to be disappointed with, it is just needed to understand that any remedy can not be a universal panacea and it has its limitations – this concerns both the reasoning and dishwashing.
Let us take a look at a specific example. Suppose you ask yourself whether it is permissible or not to fulfill your mother’s request that you have to call and tell her where you are now and with whom, especially if it is late in the evening or at night.
On the one hand, it is very unpleasant for you to always be “on the hood”, you do not want your mother to interfere with your relationship with someone else, you are extremely fatigued from further squabbles, from intrusive invasion into your personal life, and every time you obey your mother, you experience painful attacks of irritation, aggression, despair and other very unpleasant conditions.
On the other hand, you may feel sorry for your mother and understand that failure to fulfill her demands will inevitably lead to the fact that she will experience strong NE that may even affect her health.
In such a situation, you find yourself in the position of a person any action of whom will lead to one or another consequences that have one thing in common – all these consequences are undesirable for you and equally lead to suffering.
In this situation it is quite natural to think about and try to find a purely rational solution of the question (I strongly advise doing this in written).
For example:
-) she is suffering, but did not I do everything that depends on me, did not I explain to her that I do not like her intrusive invasion into my life?
=) yes, I told her, but she does not understand and continues to suffer.
-) does she have a choice?
=) she has a choice, since I told her about the selection of perceptions, she could use this to change her dogmas, control her fears.
-) it is not working out for her.
=) but what exactly does not work out? Let her show me the results of her attempts to understand, her notes, doubts. If there is nothing of these, then she does not want to change anything.
-) she cannot want to change, she is already a too well-formed person.
=) if she does not want to change then this characterizes her as a person. No one except a person can be responsible for his choice.
And so on. At some point it turns out that the arguments and counterarguments are over, since you simply have nothing more to say on the topic “can a person want to change”. Having come to this deadlock, you can see another argument somewhere in the middle of this chain and thus open a new branch of reflection, but sooner or later you will eventually come to some final.
It is not surprising that there is a frustration and a sense of powerlessness if purely logically you cannot get a definitive answer to your doubts. Such an inevitable attainment of the limit of one’s own competence is usually interpreted as evidence of the pointlessness of such reasoning in general. But this is not so. This is a completely wrong conclusion and that is why.
Firstly, in the process of such reasoning you can clarify your attitude to these or other issues for yourself. In itself it can bring great pleasure, help you in the future to perform more appropriate actions in accordance with the beliefs that you identified.
Secondly, reasoning of this kind reveals those questions which you cannot understand, in which you cannot form a justified point of view. This is interesting in itself, and besides, there may be an interest in having more to read, think, learn on this topic. It may be desirable to more accurately determine the terms used, to introduce new ones.
Thirdly, and this is the most important for me now, such analysis creates a fertile ground for the JW formation and I will dwell upon this in more detail.
If you try to distinguish JW in a situation similar to described above and do not make such analysis, you will find that they are very weak, very vague, barely perceptible. And it is not surprising – in such an acute situation, burdened with negative emotions, it is very difficult to experience JW in general. But things change if you conduct such an analysis! Now – NOTWITHSTANDING that all the branches of reasoning have reached the limit of your competence and in spite of the fact that you cannot give a clear and reasoned justification for choosing a decision, you can begin to experience a distinct JW!
And this is an extremely important result.
Your new position can now be described as: “yes, I cannot prove that my decision is optimal, that I am right in all things, but nevertheless having analyzed this situation to the best of my intellectual capabilities, experience and sincerity, I foretaste that I will follow a certain decision chosen by me. I understand that I can make mistakes in my reasoning, do not know or do not take into account something, understand something in a wrong way or falsely accent it. I understand that the subsequent experience may lead to the fact that in the future I will choose another solution, but that is now my JW and that is now my decision, and following my wishes I experience the richness of my life, I feel myself more happy, a more integral and lively person. Whatever I choose, I can make a mistake anyway and in that case I choose to do what makes me happier”.
03-13 Terms
Life is a complicated thing! Who will argue with this… And I, perhaps, will.
Imagine that you are learning to drive in one very strange driving school. The pupil is given glasses greatly diluting the visibility, the boxing gloves are worn on the hands and the thick mukluks are on their feet. It is easy to assume that the pupils of this school will be sure that it is monstrously difficult to learn how to drive a car and it is better to give up this idea at all.
People’s attempts to understand their own lives are one remove from this anti-utopian picture. Open any book on psychology, philosophy? What you see there produces a deafening impression of incredible complexity. Monad, immanence, transcendence, god, good, evil, subconsciousness, superconsciousness, super-I, emanation, benefit, harm, moral, immoral… dozens, hundreds, thousands of words that have NO definite meaning. True terminological bacchanalia. The attempts to clarify the meanings of these words with the help of dictionaries will only worsen your condition – it will not become clearer, it will become even more confusing. It is no wonder that the more sincere a person is, the more he wants to understand, and not to put on a semblance of a profound understanding, the sooner he will put aside all this junk and deal with something that he can understand. At the same time, due to worshiping these “sciences” he will adhere to the opinion that he is simply not clever enough.
The meanings of the words used by people to indicate what they are doing or experiencing are incredibly blurred. Using such words a person thinks that he “understands” what he is talking about and, even more surprisingly, hopes that other people will “understand” him! In fact, other people, as a rule, mean somewhat different, or even completely different, or even nothing definite at all by the same words.
In the field of the humanities a perverse, profoundly vicious method still reigns according to which a person invents a word first and then tries to find some meaning in it, sincerely believing that the meaning of the word appears as soon as the word is invented. The same misconceptions refer to the already existing words in the language. People are blindly convinced that if a word is used, it means that it already has a concrete and even common meaning.
The consequences of this approach are extremely destructive – the inability to come to an agreement and to understand both each other and oneself. People can argue for decades and even centuries about what the word “god” or the word “good” means rather than realizing that there is no meaning to the word and cannot be until we give some absolutely concrete meaning to the word by our willful decision. In a number of cases it is advisable simply to refuse many words, so as not to drag the entire load of countless cloudy meanings that people have tried to find in this word throughout their history.
A person who wants to think clearly, who wants to make meaningful actions, motivated by wishes based on facts, reasonable assumptions and expert assessments; a person who wants to take a clear and consistent position on a particular issue must go in the very opposite direction.
First, a set of perceptions, a set of phenomena is defined and only THEN this and only this set is assigned a designation in the form of a term. And you cannot say that this approach was any new – it built all the exact sciences! The problem is that the “Humanitarians” are trying to befog, create a mess in which it will be easy for them to catch the fish of blind trust. It can be said that the priestly instincts migrated to the present days in the form of Humanities, especially such as psychology and philosophy. It is very convenient to broadcast about morality and morals, good and evil, subconscious and ego, freedom and violence important-looking, watching contentedly as the uninitiated obeyingly give way to “wisdom” bowing their heads respectfully and some are struggling to break into neophytes and adepts.
Professional psychologists perceive my “Selection” extremely hostile precisely because my approach completely dissipates this dope so thoroughly cultivated. Anyone who reads my book can find it difficult or simple, but he will understand the main thing: the world of human perceptions is not something that is only accessible for the insiders to understand. One can distinguish between perceptions and observe and study the regularities that connect them. You can cultivate pleasant perceptions and states consisting of them and eliminate the unpleasant ones. This simplicity transforms psychology from the sacred action into an engineering discipline accessible to each person, in which the perceptions and their complexes are subjected to engineering. Psychology turns into a simple and accessible science in which everyone can become a researcher and an engineer without any diplomas and higher educations.
When I designate a certain set of perceptions with a certain term, I find that:
a) there appears a much greater clarity, accuracy in expressions, the degree of mutual understanding with the interlocutor is increased, one does not need to resort to infinite clarifications
b) it is easier to describe perceptions, build consistent models, detect (!) and describe relationships
c) it is easier to analyze and synthesize, i.e. both the process of dividing the phenomenon into a collection of elements and the process of discovering the relationships between them work out
d) I get more pleasure from the process of thinking, there is a clearer resonance of thinking and a variety of enlighten perceptions
e) I experience more certain joyous wishes that arise easily against the background of the rational clarity in the ongoing processes.
03-14 Curse of analogies
There is one widespread pathology of thinking. That is the application of analogies. I would even say that analogies are poison, completely intoxicating the rational thinking at the moment when they are used as arguments and not as mere adornment of people’s speech.
IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES the analogies can be a means of argumentation. Simply for the reason that you can always find an analogy that will be an “argument” for or against. The analogy is an arbitrary transfer of regularities from one field to another, unrelated to it, which is absolutely erroneous and unacceptable.
Based on experience it is very easy to find out that picking up an analogy supposedly “reinforcing” absolutely any point of view is simple in any discussion. And this is natural – the world around us is so diverse that it is always possible to find a phenomenon that develops according to the same laws that we want to find in the question under investigation and if we substitute objects then it is as if we got the “proof” for the fools.
Suppose someone shows a stifling concern for a child and in response to an indication that it is inexpedient he says: “if a flower is shoved into a freezer then it will die – the same with the child without care…”. It is amazing but such “argument” works for 99% of people. You can “argue”: “but if the plant is excessively watered, its roots will fog off”. Wonderful! But you can fend off: “if the soil is sufficiently loosened even the excessive watering will not lead to undesirable consequences”. Great! Unless we take into account that all these words have no bearing on the subject at issue.
After exchanges of these “arguments” people break it up, or “having reached clarity” (i.e. blindly agreeing with the point of view of the interlocutor under the influence of these analogies), or with the confidence that, reason or not, nothing will ever become clear.
Of course, where will the clarity come from if there was no reasoning?
Since analogies are an extremely successful way of mental pressure (that is almost any person changes their certainty to a greater or lesser extent under their influence), they will always be used as “arguments” by insincere, stupid or malicious people. I urge to abandon analogies in discussions at all, leaving them for literary texts or as an artistical and entertaining device in a popular science text that does not possess the slightest demonstrative power by itself.
03-15 Creation of convenient terminology
The process of creating the terminology by itself can be very exciting. For example:
=) “State [in a given period of time]” is a set of perceptions manifested during a specified period of time.
=) “Negative Emotions” (NE) – emotions that have the following characteristics:
- with their manifestation and after it there comes stupidity (i.e. a sharp weakening of the ability and wish to distinguish between perceptions);
- after them there is a bad physical condition;
- after them there is a loss of interest, anticipation, enthusiasm, other EP, JW;
- their course is incompatible with clear thinking;
- their course is incompatible with EP;
- experiencing NE you are like a programmed robot – the reactions and actions are easy to calculate in advance; your actions are extremely inefficient
- it is difficult to break free without training from the flow of NE – that is the strength of the habit of experiencing them reinforced by thousand times.
=) “Negative Attitude” (“NA”) – short, weak bursts of aggressive NE (discontent, irritation, hatred, contempt, etc.)
=) “Aggressive NE” (“ANE”) are all negative emotions that are some degree of intensity of aggression, as well as those conglomerates of NE that include aggression in any form – hatred, irritation, contempt, resentment, discontent, vengefulness and so on.
=) “Squeezing NE” (“SNE”) are emotions such as sadness, hopelessness, self-pity, etc., as well as those conglomerates of NE into which they enter.
=) “Resentment” is self-pity + aggression. Depending on the intensity of these components, you can distinguish between different types of resentment – from a weak offense to vindictiveness.
=) “Sense of Self Significance” (“SSS”) – certainty in your own exceptional significance + confidence that the whole world around you should respect you, admire you, take care of you. SSS can be fueled by the fact that a person has certain skills, property, social status, but also can exist altogether from scratch. SSS is inevitably accompanied by contempt, arrogance, touchiness, stupidity, etc. SSS and the Sense of Self Inferiority (SSI) form an inseparable pair of perceptions. If a SSS person has the certainty that someone else is more important than himself, then he immediately has a SSI towards that person. And the more SSS is expressed in someone, the more intensive his SSI will be under the appropriate circumstances.
=) “Sense of Self-Inferiority” (“SSI”) is the certainty in self-insignificance, in the fact that one deserves contempt. SSI can be fueled by the fact that a person (often completely groundless) assesses his skills, property, social status extremely low. SSI is inevitably accompanied by NE, albeit both squeezing ones, such as self-pity, feelings of despair, sadness, and others, and aggressive ones. SSS and SSI form an inseparable pair of perceptions. If a SSI person has the certainty that someone else is even less important than he is, then he immediately has SSS towards such person. And the more the SSI is expressed in someone, the more intensive the SSS he will experience under the appropriate circumstances.
=) “Bitchiness” is SSS + aggression.
=) “Wish for the Possession of EP” is MW of using EP for implementing other MW. For example, a person can imagine how important he will be if he experiences many EP, how he will be admired, how the girls will run after him and catch his every word, etc. In this case SSS is the ground on which the wish to own EP grows. Needless to say that EP will not appear on such ground – the wish to own EP is fruitless, it does not lead to EP, but leads only to the strengthening of SSS, SSI, NE.
=) “Stupidity” is the lack of skills in logical, consistent thinking, in achieving rational clarity, in dispelling dogmas. A fool does not reason, but sorts and combines dogmas.
=) “Militant Stupidity” is stupidity + the wish to defend one’s dogmas through violence, aggression, deception, suppression of dissent.
=) “Bluntness” is the lack of skills in distinguishing perceptions.
=) “Militant Bluntness“ is bluntness + the wish to implant bluntness in other people suppressing their wish to distinguish perceptions.
=) “Resonance” is the intensification of the distinctness, intensity (or any other quality) of EP in the manifestation of another perception or the spontaneous emergence of it.
=) “Enlighten Trigger” (“ETr”) is a perception that resonates with EP.
=) “Sincerity” is the JW to distinguish between perceptions. Always accompanied by EP.
=) “Self-deception” is the result of the implementation of the wish to distort the information about perceptions[for oneself].
=) “Deception” is the result of the implementation of the wish to distort information about their perceptions [supplied to someone].
=) “Truthfulness” is the provision of reliable information about their perceptions motivated by dogmatic considerations (for example, the belief in the dogma “to lie is bad”). Unlike sincerity, it is always accompanied by NE, since JW did not provide reliable information and therefore truthfulness is a form of self-abuse.
=) “Recollection” is any perception, often accompanied by the thought “it was” and always accompanied by the appropriate certainty.
=) “Mental Fixation [of perception]” is the discrimination of this perception + the thought “there is this perception”.
=) “Term” is a word by which I designate a certain set of perceptions.
=) “Result” is the manifestation of wished perceptions after efforts to achieve these perceptions.
=) “Defeat” is the absence of result.
=) “Experience” is a set of results and defeats. Often accompanied by an analysis of the situation.
=) “Strongly-Related Complex [of perceptions]” is a set of perceptions that very often or always manifest simultaneously or immediately one after another (often in a certain sequence).
(For example, “my girlfriend” is a Strongly-Related Complex of perceptions since almost always I simultaneously or immediately perceive one after another what I mean by “her face”, “her body”, “her voice”, “the meaning of her words” and so on, and I very often perceive what I mean by “her jacket”, “her caresses” and so on).
=) “Unrelated Complex [of perceptions]” is a set of perceptions that manifest themselves without any system, regularities. An example of the designation of such complexes is: “coincidence of circumstances”.
=) “Habit” – perceptions that appear during (or immediately after) certain actions, states, so that they together form a Strongly-Related Complex. For example, creating a habit of eliminating irritation means forming a Strongly-Related Complex “irritation – the effort to eliminate irritation”.
=) “Cultivation of EP” is the implementation of JW for increasing the frequency, intensity and other qualities of EP.
=) “Personality” is a Strongly-Related Complex of sensations (pleasant and unpleasant), emotions (both EP and NE), thoughts (grounded and dogmatic), wishes (joyful and mechanical), confidences (blind and enlightened).
=) “Accord” is the set of EP that is currently being experienced.
=) “Unified Goal” is an intense and stable JW actively resonating with different EP.
=) “Essential” is the one significance or intensity of which is estimated to be higher than 5 on a 10-point scale.
=) “Significant” – is the one the significance or intensity of which is estimated as from 3 to 5.
=) “Research” is the formulation of the question interesting for me and the search for a response to it through observations, experiments and subsequent analysis of the results.
=) “Expedient [act]” is an action in respect of which there is reason to believe that it will increase the probability of obtaining a result.
=) “Optimal [act]” is an action in relation to which there is reason to believe that it will lead to the most wished character of the achievement of the result – for example in a speedy or complete manner.
=) “Negative Dominant” is a NE or NB with which a person is so used to that he cannot even imagine himself outside of them, ceases to capture constant experiencing them and even if he has the wish to detect manifested NE and NB, he cannot distinguish them without long-term observations and self-examinations.
=) “[External] Manifestations of NE” or “signs of NE” are elements of behaviour (facial expressions, intonation, gestures, choice of words, etc.) which are grounds for suggesting that a person is experiencing NE.
=) “To use a person” is to realize one’s wishes in relation to a person or with his participation taking advantage of the fact that he does not openly declare his unwillingness that you do this, while not being interested in the reasons why a person does not refuse you.
=) “Defensive Position [of a Certain Person]” – the set of his actions to obstruct the achievement of clarity about his perceptions.
=) “Alienation” is the prolonged experiencing of a negative attitude.
=) “Low spirits” is the prolonged experiencing of squeezing NE.
=) “Friendliness” is a prolonged experiencing of a positive attitude.
=) “Justification” is the truthfulness in the narrative of one’s perceptions to reduce guilt feelings and to lessen the other people’s condemnation.
=) “Piety [towards a person]” is the SSI towards this person + the wish for positive interpretation of him.
=) “Change” is the creation of a new habit as a result of efforts directed at this.
=) “Observation” is a set of successive acts of distinguishing perceptions.
=) “Scientific Observation” is a set of successive acts of distinguishing and capturing perceptions.
=) “Development” is a set of changes as a result of which the richness of your life increases or does not decrease.
=) “Assistance [to another person]” – actions aimed at implementing the wishes of the other person, while he performs actions to implement his wishes by himself.
=) “Influence [of one person on another]” – actions caused by the wish for change of another person in conditions when he, at least, does not declare the reluctance concerning such your actions.
=)”Pressure [of one person on another]” – the actions caused by the wish for change in another person, although he periodically expresses his reluctance concerning such your actions, but during the vast majority of other moments he declares that he wants your actions to continue and at the same time does not commit any actions aimed at preventing your actions in his relation.
=) “Violence [of one person in relation to another]” – actions caused by the wish for change in another person in spite of the fact that he declares that he does not want you to do it.
=) “Care” is the wish to assist another person in conditions when he does not ask for your assistance and probably would not say that he needs it if you asked him.
=) “Obsessive Care [of one person about another]” – violence against another person dictated by the belief that the person himself does not understand what he wants. That is it is a kind of violence.
=) “Poisoning from NE” is the emergence or intensification of unpleasant sensations (very similar to those that arise from disease, food poisoning) that occurred as a result of NE experiencing.
=) “Nepotism” is a condition that occurs when suppressing one’s JW carried out to avoid the emergence of NE in other members of the collective. Unlike “cooperation”, nepotism is not accompanied by attempts to understand the situation and develop an optimal way for all to coexist.
=) “Ordinariness” is a condition that arises when suppressing JW characterized by a complete lack of anticipation, a sense of mystery, aspiration.
=) “Self-flagellation” is the implementation of the wish to exaggerate the significance of one’s unpleasant manifestations.
=) “Dogmatism” – certainty in the unconditional truth of the set of one’s representations accompanied by aggression towards attempts at their critical analysis.
=) “Black Dissolution” is the non-experiencing of EP and the failure to realize.
=) “Idea Fixe” is the wish accompanied by an aggressive refusal of attempts to analyze its motives.
=) “Boa Time” is a period during the day when negative states are manifested or intensified in connection with the habit to experience strong NE at this particular time of the day developed in the previous years.
=) “Jamming” is a phenomenon at which a person continues to perform some kind of activity, while experiencing a decrease in the life richness, but not allowing himself to distract and distinguish – which joyful wishes are there now.
=) “Grotto” – the ambiguity manifested during the investigation and causing anticipation, a sense of mystery.
=) “Satiety” – unpleasant fatigue arising from the receipt of impressions in the absence of EP. Continuing to receive impressions in such conditions only increases the intensity of unpleasant conditions.
=) “Eraser” is the term replacing a completely asexual, anti-erotic word “pose” – the position of bodies taken for the purpose of experiencing sexual sensations and erotic perceptions.
=) “Sniffing Enlightened Triggers” – maintaining the clarity that any situation, any event can become an enlightened trigger.
=) “Stuposthenia” is a set of negative reactions to the wish to distinguish one’s current perceptions. Annoyance, discontent, thoughts of “later” and so on – all those reactions that suppress the wish to distinguish one’s perceptions.
Every time I look through and selectively read this list of terms, I have a strong wish to continue compiling it. This is a very pleasant activity that brings real pleasure.