“You can (and should) watch your life”

From birth, we know one, basic for all living beings, position: this is a merger with our feelings and experience. A baby is a continuous experience, there is not even a drop of reflection in him, reflections on what, how and why he does it. Stimulus and immediate response, no pause, no choice. All on the machine, which provided us with billions of years of evolution. That is, the first position is emotionally reactive, based on experience, specific and individual. This is a kind of emotional-experiencing “I”. Over time, the emotionally experiencing “I” is supplemented by the attitudes of other people that dictate to our body, and consciousness in particular, how the world works and how to react to it if something happens. The main question from this point is: “What do I feel?”

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• Everyone has their own spiritual path

The second position in relation to life is found much later and not in all people. This is a rational position, that is, the ability to act not on the basis of momentary impulses or habitual patterns, but on the basis of data analysis and the extraction of new information. The attitude to life here is not reactive, but analytical. Based on this position, a person builds a rational picture of his behavior, explains to himself and others the causal relationships of events. No “it’s not clear what came over me!”, Only “this and that happened, and this led to such and such consequences.” The main question is: “What do I think?”

As a matter of fact, these two positions are enough, and people often move between the two, from one to the other. “You have to try everything in life!” – says a person from an emotionally experiencing position in relation to life, afraid that something very important or interesting will pass him by. “Yeah, some people tried heroin out of curiosity – and what happened?” – says the rational “I”. In general, the complex relationship between mind and feelings is well known to all of us.

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• What protect the boundaries of one’s own “I”

However, from time to time there comes a moment when these positions – the emotional and rational attitude to the world – do not cope. When emotions only make it difficult to contact people, and rational constructions are powerless to connect one with the other and calm the person. As a result of a failure, someone is applied to the bottle, someone crushes emotions in themselves (considering them to be the cause of troubles) – in general, actions take place within the framework of familiar positions. Somehow plug the holes in your perception of reality: cover it up with hysteria or fill it with vodka, here strengthen it with rational constructions – if only the familiar building of reality would hold, even if every time it is loosened more and more. And then a person, when he already clearly hears in his soul the crackle of the breaking familiar world, can come to a psychologist. Or to a priest. Or to someone else. With the question: what is wrong with the world or with me?

Finding third position is often described as “awakening”. If it does, change is often inevitable. It turns out that there is not only emotional reaction or intense brainstorming. The third position, which is difficult to find in the process of psychotherapy, is the position of detaching from both the emotional and rational poles and observing how our emotions unfold, as well as how we think. This is the position of a thoughtful observer-researcher, who does not set the task of immediately doing something (as required by the emotionally reactive position) or explaining (as “rationalists” are used to doing). It turns out that life can not only be experienced and analyzed. You can observe life – including your own -. And the main question from this point: “How do I think and feel?”.

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• “I like being myself”

Sounds trite? Maybe. But this shift is often impossible for many people. Often, as a psychologist, I never managed to establish a productive work, because all a person needed was to understand what to do, immediately drown out some kind of difficult experience or find an explanation. There was either no strength or desire for an existential shift, for the transition to the question “how my world works”, “how I myself work”, “how I organize interaction between myself and the world”. But it is precisely these questions that contain answers to many tasks: what to do, why and why.

I call the position of the observer the existential “I”, it is a kind of inner center, the basis of reflection, the “assembly point” of our personality. Only by moving away from emotional and rational storms, rising above them, you can see how these same storms are organized, how they work. It is important to distinguish between detachment and alienation. With alienation, we lose contact with the personality, stop seeing it as a whole or its individual parts, stop worrying or thinking. And for observation – genuine observation – contact with the observed is simply necessary. The existential “I” is not a dispassionate observer, but is included, experiencing – but still not captured headlong by a muddy stream.

The position of an existential observer-researcher is characterized by several important realizations that give particular sharpness to the observed picture.

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• “What kind of people am I made of?”

Awareness of the experimental nature of our “I”. Our psyche is a great experimenter. She constantly puts forward hypotheses about how the world works, another person or ourselves, conducts experiments to test these hypotheses and interprets the data obtained. Being at the “assembly point”, in our existential “I”, we can observe how this inner experimenter of ours works, how correctly he conducts research. Why is it so important? Because so many people start at the hypotheses stage (speculations about other people, and so on) and go straight to interpreting those hypotheses as if they had already been proven. That is, the stage of the experiment – direct contact with the world in order to check the correctness / incorrectness of the assumptions – is ignored. This is how inner worlds are formed, fixated on themselves, and it is they who create self-fulfilling prophecies. And someone conducts experiments, but makes very strange interpretations. My favorite example is when a young man complains about how he can’t get to know a “normal” girl. The question is: how does he manage to get acquainted only with “abnormal” (whatever behind this word is, this is a separate story). The young man is sure in advance that a pretty/”normal” girl will reject him. She does not do this, accepts an invitation to come on a date, and then this young man comes to the conclusion that the girl is not so good (that is, “normal”), since she agreed. And that’s it, a vicious circle, obvious to the Observing “I”, but hidden from the gaze of the direct participant.

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• Know Yourself: Need and Dream

Perception of the complex context of events. The ability to see the world as a combination of various, often contradictory phenomena and processes. From the existential “I” it is impossible to look only in one direction, rising above the fight, we see how often opposing forces reveal a surprising similarity. Religious and atheistic fanatics, radical feminists and the “men’s movement”, “Vatniks” and “Vatniks” – all these poles are united by an amazing similarity in what and how they say. It is only necessary to carry out technical work – to replace the terms with opposite ones, and that’s it – because they have the same hate speech. Dialectics – you can’t get away from this struggle and the unity of opposites. If in response to an irritant (someone’s statement or post) you explode with a firework of emotions, your hands reach for the keyboard in order to smear the villain on the computer screen – you are clearly in some way united with the one you oppose. For example, in your hatred for everything that does not fit into your picture of the world. The existential observer in us can come to life at this moment and say, “Wait a minute… How is it that you already feel such hatred for a person you don’t know? What do you dislike so much about him? Isn’t it in you? What are your own ideas about how the world and other people should be arranged that are now pushing you to enter the path of virtual war? The world is rarely—very rarely—uniform. Consciousness, fixated on itself and aimed at simplifying the picture of the world, is unable to detect its blind spots. It takes the boundaries of its horizons for the boundaries of the world … This is most clearly seen in political disputes, when both sides become blind and deaf and accuse each other of blindness and deafness (“zombieness”).

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• Reminder for the lover of Internet discussions

Humility as awareness of the limitations of one’s ability to influence the world and other people. The observing “I” concentrates on one’s own, and not someone else’s, feelings, thoughts and deeds. If you want to “clarify relations” – clearly define your position, and do not demand clarity from the other. Or, to begin with, figure out what it is, your position.

The existential shift, the discovery of not only the emotional and rational, but also the observing part in oneself, makes changes possible, but for this one must first get to one’s own “assembly point”. To feel that our habitual ways of thinking and feeling are not yet us. To realize that the endless hurdy-gurdy “you are nobody, you are nobody, you are nobody” is just a melody that scrolls without any connection with reality. For example, a girl in whose head the devaluing song “if you couldn’t do it the first time, you’re worthless, and if you did it, then it’s too easy a problem that even an idiot could handle,” at some point managed to just watch this incessant obsessive song, instead of either fighting it with your mind or emotionally joining it. Just observed, from situation to situation, that this melody does not change and that she will never leave her the slightest chance to change anything. I watched, and the usual automatism of the barrel organ began to falter, because the inner organ grinder does not like persistent observers.

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• I want to get everything at once

In general, watch yourself. behind your thoughts and emotions. This can be no less interesting than … spying on the neighbors. But it is important to remember that good observation leads to discoveries, and discoveries lead to new feelings and knowledge that turn into experience. It is impossible to be above the fight all the time, there is a time for everything, and there is a time for both feelings and reasoning. It’s just that when you feel that you are clearly being carried somewhere in the wrong direction, it’s good to have a piece of yourself somewhere that you can turn to with the question: “Hey, get up, come on. Do you need help. Please observe what I am doing and how I participate in what is happening. You sit high, look far away … “.