coldhearted scientist وداد

1.

I have changed my perspective and will change it more. I seem to be integrating. I also note that my extreme desire for life is very inspiring to some, and at the same time very repellent to others. This is quite interesting and by Googling “desire for life” I discovered Morita Therapy.  I do not have time to explain these things now.

I do note that Reeducation was centered on the idea that you should allow yourself to be engulfed by emotions (if they were negative ones). But in Morita therapy this is not required. I was incomprehensible to the Reeducators because I was comparatively Zen-like. They considered this a problem and I was very shocked by that. But I was not wrong.

The most irritating thing about me is how I hold myself back.

2.

Speaking of which: how do you know if you have a work ethic? I was recently told I had an amazing one, which surprised me since I think of myself as an overburdened and disrupted slacker. That is, of course, since Reeducation.

Before Reeducation, if you had asked me about work ethics I would have said what? I am not even Protestant, let alone Puritan, and I do not think in those terms. Was I a hard worker? I would have said hard enough, but not work obsessed — I kept a regular schedule with time off, during which I did not think about work. During work time I would work, and I was efficient. I suppose this is a work ethic but the entire concept seems so very Western to me, and foreign.
I would have said: you place yourself at the center of your life (I was never in favor of the decentering of the self, I had spent too much time dealing with peoples’ attempts to decenter me to consider any kind of decentering, liberation), but you do not pay too much attention to self, you pay attention to what is happening and to what you are doing or working on or thinking about.

Morita therapy would say these things, but it is not a behaviorist therapy even though many Western adopters appear to have molded it that way. Here is a short text on it. I appear to be Zen, existentialist, and anti-colonialist in ways most people aren’t. That is because of the intellectual and political atmosphere there was when I was a child. Many did not pick up all of these things.

Axé.