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Now, I’m sitting and thinking about an opening line for this note. It’s only 2pm. I’ve done the set of morning exercises, and, before having breakfast, decided to write something. Maybe I can begin by describing what was going through my mind while I was meditating. I’ve had an interesting observation that all my “random” thoughts become very clear if I’m able to detect how they stem from one another. I thought about the free-association technique, trying to figure out why it’s so difficult to liberate our thoughts from daily servitude to the will. Yesterday, I read a superficial book by F. Perls (one of his latest books), where he considered any kind of dualism as pathology and claimed that anybody who separates himself from his own desires, needs, etc., is psychologically ill. This old fart believed that we all must be united with our “self”, taking responsibility for that. I think that for him the self was just as much an empty notion as it was for Kant. Kant used the term “transcendental unity of apperception”; Perls shortened it to “gestalt”, but both knew nothing about what they tried to grasp with their purely linguistic concepts. No doubt, these are good concepts to describe and explain certain aspects of our existence, but they have nothing to do with the profundity of psychological wisdom accumulated throughout the history of human development. It’s so bloody superficial! We all perceive ourselves as the thinking and acting (or acting and thinking) beings. Most people, however, are obsessed with their actions, so that living and acting are almost synonymous for them. Hence, their self is rooted in acting, while thinking is reduced to a mere tool which functions only as a regulator of their actions.
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