The Central

But that doesn't mean that you are living from who you really are, your Individual Essence, your true Self, and all such various concepts. This seems to me to be a naive idea that came about half a century ago: that all you have to do is recognize and experience deeply enough what is holding you back, let go of it, and then your luminous being will appear on stage all by itself.

Even how you have sex, how and what you eat, how you approach people, how you feel at parties, how you think about God, and how you are fussy about many things – all ways of dealing with life that you were not born with, but that you have become accustomed to.

How easily you get hurt when someone else finds fault with you, or how you blow up when someone touches your sore spot?

It is, in a way, the (provisional) harvest of my therapeutic work and life, the fruit of my later years. Provisional because, despite my relatively advanced age, I still see myself as completely unfinished, and in a few years I will almost certainly see and say many things differently than I do now. You may think (not without reason), well, if he has nothing to say that has any substance, then he should keep quiet, there are already enough books in the world.

For ten, maybe twenty years now, I have disliked books in which one person suggests that others should see the world as he or she sees it.