Everyone Has Their Own Road: Stages and Motives of a Postgraduate

Till a voice, vicious as conscience, tormented me through day and night,
And kept whispering inside my chest, without a break:
“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”...

Diligence and the ability to work, together with an interest in psychology, became the foundation—and... I set off (2017).

And then: “נס גדול היה שם” (Hebrew) — “A great miracle happened there” 👁‍🗨

4 stages: each one has:

• A foundation (motivation expressed metaphorically)
• Qualities formed at that stage
• A dreidel (the leading part of the personality construct at that stage)
• A leitmotif (the stage's epigraph)

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Stage 1

“Every step that wounds the feet on an untrodden path can pour a drop of consolation into an exhausted soul. And after every hard day on the road, sleep comes so much easier at night!
And you, idle talkers, dare—lounging on featherbeds—to call it madness.”

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ψ. Psychology is for those who see lies and deceit.
ψ. Who want to understand and to be understood themselves.
ψ. Who aren't motivated by mediocrity and a soft couch.
ψ. Who see through it all and therefore don't want to hang around VAMP.
ψ. Even if the hedonistic principle ruled there forever!

Qualities: [Diligence, hard work]

Dreidel: “Pro”

Combines: 🔵 + 🔵

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Stage 2

Are you ready to be a mirror, to reflect everything human that people refuse to accept? Are you ready to be the one they need?

“To take in a filthy stream and not become polluted, you have to be a sea.”

How do you tell whether this is the other person's reflection—or their clear view of you?

How do you avoid taking someone else's projection for truth, and truth for rationalization?

Answer: live by the principle: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”.

An oil painting!

A social elevator in Maslow's pyramid.

Fairy tales of Good and Evil, Eros and Thanatos.

What comes first—feeling or reason?

An egoistic Samaritan? Altruist or sadist?

Half the puzzle was assembled from the bottom...

Qualities: [Fanaticism, excitement for the other]

Dreidel: “Chaos”

Combines: 🌓

Leitmotif: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me” (Terence)

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Stage 3

An inner Cirque du Soleil as accompaniment to existence.

The unconscious is easier to see in a fractured “I”.

Where there is conflict, there is the key to the solution. (K. Duncker's concept.)

There are those here who, without hiding their faces behind a persona, will contribute to that Temple of Science at the cost of their lives; one day, as if carved in granite, Wiki will write of them: “They came as nobodies, went into a nosedive, left at the peak”.

The saga resumes: the psych faculty lies ahead, forbidden runes on our hands—the secret sign of that very closed fight club.

Qualities: [Courage, radicalism, obsession, overcoming]

Dreidel: “Shadow”

Combines: 🌓🌧🌷

Leitmotif: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” (Apple, Think Different, 1997)

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Stage 4

“The worldview of reverence for life grows out of accepting the world as it is.
And the world shows us the repulsive inside the beautiful, the senseless inside what is full of meaning, the sorrowful inside the joyful. However we look at it, it remains a mystery to us...
Reverence for life gives us a spiritual connection with the world that does not depend on what we know of the universe. Through the shadowed valley of resignation, by inner necessity, it leads us toward the radiant heights of ethical affirmation of world and life.”

Qualities: [Humanism, humility]

Dreidel: “Child”

Combines: 🟡 + 🔵 + 🛑

Distinctive feature: strengthened by humanistic ethics and a respectful, accepting attitude toward others.

Leitmotif: “Reverence for life”

📍📍📍📍📍

There was so much of everything: some things died, some passed through the sieve of reality, some transformed, and some became food for something new.

Some points were there, others are still there; about a third set I'll keep quiet, of course; a fourth I've forgotten and repressed—but absolutely all of it was needed, all of it, all of it, all of it was needed.

Of course, they're all just a clumsy, purely human little attempt to express the depth of experience and feeling through a rough little word.

And these little words of mine—sometimes they come as aphorisms; I try prose—it won't contain it; I resort to quoting great minds—still not right... That's why the text is crooked, fragmentary, cocky: because I myself don't know how to describe neatly what I can't even encompass... and who could? Shakespeare, maybe? Goethe?

And so it's time to begin a new stage: they say that if you want to master a science, you have to teach it.

That is how the teacher learns from the student. Systematize knowledge, explain—and thereby absorb—one topic after another.

It's time to put in order and, so to speak, “comb” the knowledge I've picked up from different authors, schools, and approaches.

I won't lie or pretend to be embarrassed—there's a lot of it; for years I've been hauling it out of books and lectures. Consistently, bit by bit.

I've read so much psychology by now that I've stopped understanding what is psychology, what is my worldview, and where it's simply creative phantasmagoria incompatible with the reality principle.

So, we can begin... Where should I start?

— “Hello, dear students. My name is Anton Yuryevich, and I'm your new lecturer...”

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Well, noooo... just like that? Where's that cocky expressiveness? Where's the shoutiness of the text? Where did the madcap pathos go, the pompous cleverness of words and allegories?

After all:

“A desperate, passionate temper was given him,
In everything he sees madness at full scale,
From earthly joys, every single hour,
He breaks away somewhere in attempts.”

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Pff... Pow... pow... Spark, spark of rebellion!...

Egyptian darkness over the world, baptism by an ankh,
Dad comes home sober, a loaf in his hand

Here's how I'd put it:

I'm ready, wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? 😅
I'll give you words, so many words, word-swords.🐑
I don't spend every summer locked away for nothing, forever trying to solve some shit, only making my own life harder—but you who have read this, look:
I'll believe only in a science that, among other things, also knows how to dance💃🕺
And we'll still go roaming with the whole gang down Sadovaya,
Then we'll invite the bony lady to a paso doble.
A dance with death—ooh-la-la
Everybody dance: lamtsa-dritsa-op-tsa-tsa
In the dance, the mistral and I
Will topple heaven's very throne,
Trample the world in half an hour! Postgrads, ooh-la-la
This is maturity, gentlemen. How much thrill, how much life in it.
Drain the poison from life's cup,
And at the bottom you'll see meanings...
The point of this whole stunt is simple:
A pen won't labor for eternity
Unless it's dipped into the tremors of night 🌠