Book 2 – EN

When you want to enhance your own wisdom, you must first learn to function optimally. This is then about presence and being undivided. About self-evidently engaging the things you must engage. This means you have to become a whole and to merge with your activities and the others. Integration thus and coming home. Experiencing the world and yourself as your own. That is not always self-evident. Sometimes you experience yourself and the word as strange. Alienation! Certainly when you step out of your comfort zone. This book addresses what alienation is, as well as its five different stages. Why do we use the term alienation and not the term stress? Firstly, the term alienation better indicates what it is about. Secondly, this term doesn’t have the positive connotations which sometimes are inherent to stress. Thirdly, alienation is already since the Middle Ages the original term to refer to this kind of phenomena.

In the first stage of alienation your activity of the moment becomes strange. You startle and examine what is going on. The second stage is about shutting you off from and letting go of your environment and your own emotions and thoughts. These become strange to you. In the third stage you respond to your environment based on emotions such as anger and anxiety, as if that environment were a strange one. In the fourth you turn off your feelings and you make your world smaller and drabber, with all its inherent joyless hopelessness. A strange world. In the fifth stage lastly, the one of de-compensation, you land in the miseries of a psychological or bodily breakdown. Then everything becomes even more strange.

Of course we also address extensively what you can do to prevent and counter stress and undesired alienation. In this way you make your environment more pleasant for yourself and others, stay healthy and make your environment manageable, comprehensible and meaningful.  In short, you live with more wisdom, in all your life domains, and make your life more worthwhile.