Tag: psychology

It’s curious how the mind, despite not knowing the limits to the intensity with which it experiences its states, can hardly reconstitute them accurately. It is much easier to recall acts committed, even if these have generated less intense psychological effects, or even none at all. This seems to show that psychological states only make a mark insofar as they induce some real action; and it is this, after all, that makes them recallable. A very useful precept can be drawn from this: when we want a state of mind to last, we have to act under its influence; when we want to forget it, we just have to entrust its dissipation to inaction.

The positive function of dreams is usually nothing more than a stimulus to the imagination. One can dream a lot without doing anything; one can even live in one’s dreams, enjoying oneself and truly feeling when dreaming. However, in the most common type of conscious dream, there is something that, if not exactly playful, is certainly free of the weight of real action. All this changes when the dream takes the form of a design, a purpose, which usually occurs when one gives up something for it. Here, the dream densifies, the dream already influences life and, to a certain extent, begins to materialize. It’s true, it’s true: it often remains unrealizable, or at least does not come true. That may not matter; the seriousness it takes on is enough to differentiate it from ordinary dreams and, above all, to decide.

The mind really does have this tendency to get irritated by small and large disturbances, prolonging the irritation indefinitely, often planning some reactive action, imagining its consequences and facing them on an imaginary level. What does not usually occur to it is that, once forgotten, the irritation stops. But if it really wants to overcome it, if it really wants to turn it into something positive and uplifting, all it takes is to crush the endless arguments of instinctive reasoning by manifesting benevolence towards the irritable in a concrete act. As if by magic, peace of mind emerges and irritation becomes a good feeling.

Observing this phenomenon of assumption, or crystallization of the personality over and over again, one notices some very curious cases in which it happens outside the usual time, already in maturity, sometimes on the verge of old age. For some reason, if not because of a traumatic effect, it seems that the masks suddenly fall off, suddenly become unnecessary, and the effect is quite curious because an abrupt behavioral change takes place in an adult who is already made, already recognized as such. And then, saint or monster, this version seems to be the only true one; it is certainly the definitive one.