One of our readers attended the seminar of the philosopher Oscar Brenifier and shared her impressions.
“So I got to Brenifie. More precisely, Brenifier got to me. As he himself says, “I will disappear from your life, but you yourself will remain forever.” Oscar calls critical thinking the ability to separate the false from the truth. In business, we are accustomed to understand this as something else and use it more often as a well-established stamp in personnel assessment systems. However, Brenifier’s method just reveals all the stamps and breaks the usual shells with which we close ourselves from our true words and desires. He asks everyone sitting in front of him uncomfortable, strange, and sometimes very frank questions. All of them are very simple. For example: why do you lie all the time? Do you like to worry all the time? Why do you need so much love?
The answer to them is simple, like all ingenious. No interjections, shades of gray and other verbiage. Do you like life? Do you want to be free? Why not free then? Yes? Not? There is no third.
What if you can’t answer a question? “I don’t know,” Oskar himself says in these cases. And he confirms that admitting ignorance is not scary, just as it’s not scary to seem stupid. “All people are funny and stupid by definition,” says the philosopher. It’s not easy to feel funny or stupid, is it? However, there is not a drop of snobbery or teaching in this statement: Oscar considers himself just as funny and stupid. Only, unlike most of the participants in his seminars, he is not afraid to speak out about it.
What else does he talk about while others look down and pick at the salad with a fork:
1) People give you what you give them.
(For example, if it often happens in your life that people do not trust you or deceive you, then it is highly likely that you behave similarly in relation to the world around you).
2) What we habitually call a question is in most cases not a question.
(It can be anything: a comment, a judgment, an objection … But not a question. Two signs of a real question, according to Oscar, are words such as “why”, “how”, “what for”, and its length is no more than 12 words). Anything over 12 words, as a rule, is the narcissism of the author of the “question” or the so-called “political issue”, which has a completely different function.
3) In continuation of the previous one: as a rule, people do not speak, but want to build an image.
(People in general often do not recognize the existence of “difficulties with their brain,” as the philosopher claims. That is, they do not see the difference between how easy it is to “speak” and how to “speak ‘” [stroke] – that is, qualitatively, consciously.)
No one said this better than Spinoza, and it is his words that Brenifier cites as an example of pure, clouded awareness: “Truth is clarity, clarity is truth.”
We all use so many unnecessary words to distort our thought. In that case, of course, when this idea exists. Therefore, Oskar casually compiles a dictionary of the true Russian language, in which the meanings of words are interpreted on the basis of their function as a substitute for pure meaning in the language. Here is my personal list of my own “deputies”, which I was surprised to catch after the seminar and will continue to catch with the help of my husband, friends and colleagues:
1) “absolutely” = “shut up!”
A word that directly asks the interlocutor to be silent, and for a long time.
2) “of course” = “you don’t realize who I am, and compared to me, you are complete …”
After the word “of course” nothing more can be said, that is, it deliberately ends the dialogue.
3) “not yet” = “I leave hope for …”
A dishonest word, a false friend of an opponent, in Russian means that a person leaves hope for something and leads the interlocutor by the nose.
4) “sometimes” = “yes, but I don’t want to admit it to myself”
This is from the series “Sometimes I abuse alcohol …”. Yes or no, remember? You don’t need a third.
5) “really” = helps to be convinced of one’s own significance and to be sure of the meaning of what was said to oneself.
… But it does not contribute to building a constructive dialogue.
I am going to radically eradicate all these crutches of the speaker from my life. How and what we say is a mirror image of how and what we think. Why do I need a brain full of husks? No need. Therefore, personally, I am going to train the ability to think critically in the same way that we train the body and spirit. What will come of it will depend on myself, my perseverance and readiness to change. And I will be grateful to everyone who will help me learn to separate the husk from the essence.
PS Books by Brenifier deserve a separate word. Be sure to type and look on the Internet for yourself if you are not already familiar with them. These are books for adults and children, which make the possibility of their communication real, non-fictional, forcing them to listen and talk, and not to replace real communication with what is commonly called a joint pastime – a movie, a shopping center, a cartoon … Why do I live? Do people live for children? What is happiness? What does art look like? “All these questions were so easy for us as children and become so prohibitively difficult as adults. Brenifier teaches us to remain children as adults, and reminds us why the golden words were spoken by a child: “And the king is naked!”
Master classes by Oscar Brenfie will take place on May 3-5 and June 21-22 in Moscow. Registration and detailed information on the site brenifier.ru.