https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7GmD_cCHfiE
Let’s say you go into a… you can do this in a room, it’s quite fun to do it just when you’re sitting in a room, like a room, maybe your bedroom, you can sit there and just sort of meditate on it and think, okay, if I wanted to spend ten minutes making this room better, what would I have to do? And you have to ask yourself that, right? It’s not a command, it’s like a genuine question. And things will pop out in the room that, you know, like there’s a stack of papers over there that’s kind of bugging you, and you know that maybe a little order there would be a good thing, and you know you haven’t… There’s some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven’t attended to for like six months, and the room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren’t all tangled up the same way, and like if you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment, there’ll be all sorts of things that’ll pop out in it that you could just fix. And you know, I might say, well, if you were coming to see me for psychotherapy, the easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room. You think, well, is that psychotherapy? And the answer is, well, it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being. And I would say, start where you can start, you know? If something announces itself to you, which is a strange way of thinking about it, as in need of repair, that you could repair, then hey, fix it. You fix a hundred things like that, your life will be a lot different. Now, I often tell people to fix the things you repeat every day, because people tend to think of those as trivial, right? You get up, you brush your teeth, you have your breakfast, you know, you have your routines that you go through every day. Well, those probably constitute 50% of your life. And people think, well, they’re mundane, I don’t need to pay attention to them. It’s like, no, no, that’s exactly wrong. The things you do every day, those are the most important things you do. Hands down. All you have to do is do the arithmetic. You figure it out right away. So, a hundred adjustments to your broader domain of being, and there’s a lot less rubbish around and a lot fewer traps for you to step into. And so, that’s in keeping with Jung’s idea about erasing the dis- once you’ve got your mind and your emotions together, and once you’re acting that out, then you can extend what you’re willing to consider yourself, and start fixing up the things that are part of your broader extent. Now, sometimes you don’t know how to do that, so you might say, imagine you’re walking down Bloor Street, and there’s this guy who’s like alcoholic and schizophrenic, and has been on the streets for ten years, he sort of stumbled towards you and, you know, incoherently mutters something. That’s a problem. And it would be good if you could fix it, but you haven’t got a clue about how to fix that. You just walk around that and go find something that you could fix, because if you muck about in that, not only is it unlikely that you’ll help that person, it’s very likely that you’ll get hurt yourself. So, you know, just because while you’re experiencing things announce themselves as in need of repair, doesn’t mean that it’s you, right then and there, that should repair them. You have to have some humility. You know, you don’t walk up to a helicopter that isn’t working and just start tinkering away with it. You have to stay within your domain of competence, but most of the time, if people look at their lives, you know, it’s a very interesting thing to do. I like the idea of the room, because you can do that at the drop of a hat. You know, you go back to where you live and sit down and think, okay, I’m going to make this place better for half an hour. What should I do? You have to ask. And things will just pop up like mad. And it’s partly because your mind is a very strange thing. As soon as you give it a name, a genuine name, it’ll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim. And that’s actually how you see to begin with. And so if you set it a task, especially, you have to be genuine about it, which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together, and then you have to get them in your body so you’re acting consistently. You have to be genuine about the aim, but once you aim, the world will reconfigure itself around that aim, which is very strange. And it’s technically true. You know, the best example of that, you have all seen this video where you watch the basketballs being tossed back and forth between members of the white team versus the black team, and while you’re doing that, a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video and you don’t see it. It’s like, you know, if you thought about that experiment for about five years, that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it. Because what it shows you is that you see what you aim at, and that man, if you can get one thing through your head, as a consequence of even being in university, that would be a good one. You see what you aim at. And so because one inference you might draw from that is, be careful what you aim at. Right? What you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you. And so if the world is manifesting itself in a very negative way, one thing to ask is, are you aiming at the right thing? Now, you know, I’m not trying to reduce everybody’s problems to an improper aim. People get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons. You know, they get sick, they have accidents. There’s a random element to being, that’s for sure. But, and so you don’t want to take anything, even that particular phrase, too far. You want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people. But it’s still a great thing to ask. Okay, so Rogers was a phenomenologist, and he was interested in, he didn’t start his philosophy from the perspective of subject versus object, or from the idea of psyche, like sort of inside you, your mind with its layers. That’s not how he looked at it. And so let’s go through, well, I’ll introduce you to Rogers. I think I’ll, and then we’ll talk about it more next time. I’m going to start, though, with something that I learned from him, that I think was of crucial importance. And so we’ll set the stage for the further discussion with this. And I’m going to read it to you. Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive communications, we may say that the greater the communicated congruence of experience, awareness, and behavior on the part of one individual, the more the ensuing relationship will involve a tendency towards reciprocal communication with the same qualities. Mutually accurate understanding of the communications, improved psychological adjustment and functioning in both parties, and mutual satisfaction in the relationship. It’s quite a mouthful. What does it mean? Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact and to receive communications,