Radical opening and anaïs nin

I'm preparing to contribute to the first radical opening dialectical behavioral therapy training seminar, or Rodbt, given in the Brazilian territory (our friends of Rodbt Brazil contributed to Thomas Lynch to capture his online course - but the first course In fact given here it will be in CEFI!

Whenever I will talk about Ro DBT I make a point of reproducing a quote from Anaïs Nin (French writer, 1903 - 1977), which is almost a slogan of this approach:

“We don't see the world as it is - we see the world as we are.”

If this phrase does not breathe contextualism, I think no other could do so. It is not enough to capture luminous reflexes in our retinas - our history of learning and even genetic history determine much of our visual experience, for example.

I decided to go after the origin!

The author used this phrase in her book “Seduction of the Minotaur” (1961), illustrating different perceptions. The character Lillian and the character Jay walk along the Sena River, and Lillian is shocked to notice the “sparkling, silky and winding” river, in stark contrast to the description of Jay, who sees the river “a fermented and opaque mud” . Also, in another passage, a homeless woman sleeps on the sidewalk in front of Panthéon in Paris, and when they try to help her, she refuses, saying “I prefer to sleep here, where all great men in France are buried. They accompany me and watch ”.

Lillian then remembers the phrase above, which would be of Talmudic origin.

Talmud is a collection of comments on Mishnah, a part of Jewish culture that accompanies its Bible, yet in oral tradition (it was written only in the year 200, long after the Jewish Bible - 600 BC - for preservation purpose. ).

The text in question deals with dream interpretation. In another recent translation, he reads: “Rabbi Samuel Bar Nahmani said Rabbi Yonatan said: One person is shown in his dream only the thoughts of his heart when he was awake.”

It is interesting to think about it. Is what we see in a dream just a mirror of who we are? And, equipped with this brilliant perception of a French author reading a translation of an ancestral Jewish text (perhaps only a stretch), even the world we see is not just a mirror of what we are?

Can we get rid of ourselves?