Philosophers should, according to my old college professor,** recognize the “necessity for abandoning the quest for the reality behind the appearance.” We are imprisoned in our consciousness, in the pure distancing and effeteness of mind. We only see our eyes, to put it strangely but true. And beyond that, we are trapped in a universe so infinite that there will never be a way out. Think – or rather feel-think – this way, and the next step is to sense that life is wrong.
I believe that this existential limbo is a background silence in our existence. It could be said to compete with depression as a source of unmeaning in our lives.
What saves human beings from this fate is their child heart, with which we started and which beats within. But that part saves us to love or to hate or to live in their war zone. It’s the pure feeling part, new in the world, born benign or born on fire.
Human psychology is based on the subterranean quiddity of consciousness versus feeling. There’s destruction and creation, fire and benignity. Only a child builds a sandcastle or a sculpture or a telescope paying no mind to its inevitable disintegration. Their meaning is feeling, which is timeless, whatever lofty thought they may later attach to it.
I believe that psychotherapy, based on this quiddity, must deal in feeling, lay bare feeling, much more than it deals in consciousness. As long as there is one atom that was not burned, at the very beginning, there will be life that wants to live, despite the prison that we are, and that surrounds us.
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* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MsuqvLIttk. Woody Allen on the meaninglessness of life.
** James F. Sheridan, Jr., Ph.D., Once More From the Middle, A Philosophical Anthropology, Ohio University Press, Athens, 1973, page 1.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.