(EPUB) The Truth Is Absolutely Relative - Through Attentive Observation to Transcending the Self

From personal development to spiritual liberation

You are stuck in traffic and someone cuts you off. Before you know it, irritation rises, you mutter something unfriendly, and your mood is spoiled for the next ten minutes. Or someone keeps interrupting you in a meeting, and you withdraw without saying a word. Recognizable? Reactions like these unfold razor-fast, completely automatically. You do not have to do anything consciously for them — stronger still, you can hardly stop them.

Such automatisms are everywhere in our thinking and doing: in how we react to criticism, how we deal with disappointment, how we make ourselves smaller in certain situations or, on the contrary, bigger and more defensive, how we respond to compliments, how we handle disapproval. They are emotional and mental algorithms that once arose as functional protection, but now often produce precisely what you wanted to prevent.

There is a way out. Not by working on yourself, but by investigating yourself and your behavior — attentively, without judgment. In this way you experience the space beyond your automatic reactions. Through phenomenological self-inquiry you discover something even more surprising: what you experience as ‘I’, as self, is a habit, an identity that arose on its own. And it is precisely the unconscious identification with your self-image that limits your freedom of thinking and doing.

The twelve themes — from Perception, Attention, Relationships and Creating Meaning to Wisdom and Truth — invite you to look in a radically different way, and to experience that there is more freedom of thinking and doing than you ever imagined. Each theme has an Introduction and, at the end, Integration Exercises for active integration.

After reading and practicing you can —

- train your mind in attentive observation
- recognize and interrupt counterproductive habitual behavior
- purposefully widen your emotional and mental freedom of              movement
- relax into the natural space and stillness of your mind

Ramo de Boer (1957) works as a Gestalt and relationship therapist, trainer and author.