There is a story you carry. You carry it so close to your skin that you have stopped noticing it as a story at all. It feels like a tattoo on your shoulder you almost forgot about. Like simple gravity. Like this particular weird smile on your face in the mirror on Mondays.

But, let’s be honest: everything you believe about yourself - who you are, what you deserve, what is possible, what is dangerous - was handed to you by the family you grew up with, or by the spirit of the place you lived in so long ago. Or maybe there is this old wound, turned into scar forever. A moment of tenderness so brief you almost forgot it happened. Someone, somewhere, somehow - long before you developed the critical faculty to question them, planted the words and sentences inside you. And those sentences became the lens through which all subsequent experience was filtered, sorted, and made meaningful. Those sentences created the plot of your past and probably of your present.

It is, in fact, the very condition of being human, but the real question is not whether you have inherited narratives. The question is: do you know which ones are running through your Soul?

I. How Narratives Shape Reality, Meaning, and Identity

Otto Rank kept and shared in his books a deeper fidelity to truth, making a radical claim: the human being is, above all else, a willing creature - a being who creates and participates, actively, in the construction of their experience. And yet. Before the will can create freely, it must first recognize what it has already created - unconsciously, obediently, out of the raw material of borrowed stories.

A narrative does three things simultaneously:

It shapes your Reality - what you perceive as possible, safe, or true. Two people walk into the same room. One sees the couch of opportunity; the other sees the threat behind the emptiness. The room has not changed. The narrative has.

It shapes your Meaning - why you do what you do, why you suffer what you suffer, why certain things feel like destiny and others like punishment. The true meaning is never found, because we were the blind architects behind the giant construction - a skyscraper with stories already in circulation within you. Where is the elevator taking you?

It shapes your Identity - the answer you give, reflexively, when someone asks: Who are you? Watch how quickly the answer comes. Watch how practiced it sounds - a name, a role, a case history. I am a mother. I am someone who struggles. I am not the kind of person who…

The story comes before the self, or so it seems. Until you take a closer look at the inventory.

Pause here…

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II. The Mirror and the Maker

There is a paradox at the heart of narrative therapy - particularly in the tradition that emerged from the work of Michael White and David Epston in Australia - and it is a paradox worth sitting with rather than resolving too quickly.

The paradox is that you are both the story and the storyteller.

On one hand, you are inside the narrative. You did not choose the family you were born into, the language your emotions were given, the way love or silence or anger was modeled for you. The narrative, in this sense, preceded you. You are an idea that came into form.

On the other hand, you are always, in every moment, performing the story - retelling it, re-enacting it through the choices you make, the relationships you draw near, the opportunities you unconsciously sabotage or seize. And in the performing, you are also - whether you know it or not - constantly editing.

This is the opening that narrative therapy holds out like a lantern in the dark: the story has not ended... You are not its conclusion, you are its living, breathing, revising author, and possibly the new Michelangelo. Your never-ending story is happening now.

Storytelling, in this sense, is not merely a literary act. It is the primary act of self-creation. The myths we live by - the hero who must suffer before he is worthy, the woman who must diminish herself to be loved, the child who decided early that their needs were too much - these are not decorative fictions. They are operating systems that determine what data gets let in, and what gets filtered out before it can disturb the coherence of the existing narrative. And here is the radical question that narrative therapy dares to ask: What has been excluded from your dominant story? What experiences, qualities, desires - what evidence of yourself - has been systematically left out or erased, because it didn’t fit the plot?

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III. If Reality Is a Mirror – What Does It Reflect?

Rank wrote of two fundamental human fears, held in eternal tension: the fear of life and the fear of death. Not death as biological ending, but death as the loss of self - dissolution, merger, disappearance into the other. And life as the terrifying, exhilarating demand to individuate - to become, fully and unapologetically, a singular self. Between these two fears, each of us develops what Rank called the will - and with it, a character, a style of being, a way of navigating the impossible tightrope between belonging and becoming. This is where the archetype question becomes not a personality test, but a genuine philosophical inquiry.

When you look at the mirror of your relationships, your recurring patterns, your dreams - not the sleep-dreams, but the ones you carry quietly in daylight - what figure do you see?

Do you see the Adapted One - the self that has become extraordinarily skilled at reading rooms, meeting needs, softening edges, because somewhere early on, survival required it? The Adapted One is gifted. And the Adapted One is exhausted.

Do you see the Rebel - the one who defines themselves in opposition, who mistakes reaction for freedom, who cannot rest until the authority has been overthrown - only to find a new authority, endlessly? The Rebel is alive. And the Rebel is still, in some essential way, enslaved.

Do you see the Creator - the one Rank most admired - not free of conflict, but capable of transforming the conflict into form? The Creator does not escape the pain. The Creator makes something of it.

And beneath all of these - the oldest, most foundational question:

Who am I when no one is watching?

When no role is required?

When the performance stops?

This is not a question with an answer you find. It is the question you live - and the living of it, the willingness to sit with its vertigo without rushing to fill the silence with an old story, is itself the most beautiful gesture of courage.

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IV. Truth and Reality

Here, finally, is the distinction that Rank spent his life trying to articulate. And that our culture spends enormous energy collapsing.

Reality, in the psychological sense, is the domain of perception. Of social roles. Of the identities conferred upon us by the groups we belong to, the institutions we move through, the relationships that reflect us back. Reality is relational. Reality is contextual. Reality is, to a remarkable degree, consensual - we agree, collectively, on what is real, and this agreement has enormous power.

But Reality is not Truth.

Truth, for Rank, belongs to the domain of Becoming. It is not a fixed thing to be found, but a dynamic, unfolding process of self-creation. Truth is what you touch when you act from your deepest will - not the surface will that wants approval, comfort, safety - but the will beneath that, the will that wants to be, fully and at whatever cost.

The tension between these two is the generative tension of a fully human life.

We need Reality. We are social creatures and we have our roles - the question is how to hold them lightly enough that they do not become a prison.

We also need Truth. And the experience - however brief, however terrifying - of being more than our roles. Of being the one who watches the roles being played. Of knowing, in some irreducible way, that we have something that cannot be reduced to the story engraved within us.

The invitation is not to choose one over the other. The invitation is to become conscious of the difference. To be able to say: This is the role I am playing right now - and to play it well, with full presence - while simultaneously knowing: I am so much more.

The Courage to Re-write

The narratives you have lived by were not malicious. They were adaptive. They were the best available map for the territory you found yourself in. Honor them for that. They kept you alive.

They helped you belong.

They gave form to what might otherwise have been formless.

And now - perhaps - some of them have become too small for who you are trying to become.

The work is not to destroy the old story. The work is to become a more conscious author of the next chapter. To notice when you are writing from habit, from fear, from the voice of someone long ago who handed you a sentence and called it truth. And to pause, in that noticing, and ask:

Is this still mine? Does this still serve? If I could write this differently - not perfectly, not without uncertainty - but differently - what would I write?

Otto Rank believed that the greatest act of human courage was the act of self-creation: the willingness to become an individual, to bear the guilt of separating from the herd, to take responsibility for the authorship of one’s own life. It is not a comfortable courage - it asks you to hold the uncertainty of an open question rather than the false comfort of a closed answer.

But it is, he believed - and I too believe - the only courage that matters.

You are not the story that was told about you - you are the one who gets to decide what to do with it.

What is one sentence in your current story that you are ready to revise?

Archetype I: Extroverted Sensing

There is a tension between immersion and dissolution, between being fully alive in the moment and losing the thread of a self that persists beyond it. The Jungian shadow is the opposite of its gift: where it excels at presence, it must learn to tolerate absence, stillness, the discomfort of looking inward rather than outward. Rank names this the tension between surrender - to experience, to sensation, to life itself - and will - the force that shapes experience rather than merely receives it.

You create by doing. Not by planning what you’ll do, and not by reflecting on what you’ve done - by the act itself, in real time. Your will is expressed through contact: with substances, with people, with the physical world. When you are most alive, you are most present. Your Rankian will is the will of the craftsman, the athlete, the performer - the one who cannot explain how everything happens, but knows how to reach the goal.

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The shadow of this archetype is stagnation mistaken for depth. When your gift for presence curdles, it becomes avoidance of interiority - restlessness disguised as vitality, novelty-seeking disguised as aliveness. Your shadow asks: what are you running from? Integration does not mean becoming still - it means being able to choose stillness without panic.

You flourish most visibly when you are in contact, generating engagement and positive emotion - you are rarely disconnected from what is in front of you, and you extract sensation and pleasure from life with unusual directness. Your edges are meaning and accomplishment over time - the long arc is harder to hold than the vivid instant. Flourishing, for you, is learning that depth and intensity are not opposites.

This Archetype creates the way a musician improvises: the composition and the performance are the same moment. There is no gap between impulse and expression - which means your creativity is always slightly surprising, even to itself. It does not make plans. It makes things.

Your Archetype is like a current.

The Current does not arrive - it passes through, and in doing so, changes everything it touches.

There is a particular kind of hunger that does not gnaw at the stomach but at the soul: the restlessness of a person who suspects that more of themselves is still waiting to be lived. It is an unshakable urge to not merely exist, but to author one’s own existence - not ambition or desperation, but something older and quieter. It is the hunger that precedes the dream.

To be hungry in this sense is to be alive to your own potential - it is an existential need, not the need to consume, but the need to become. And yet hunger, left alone, devours itself. The artist who starves only for recognition ends in bitterness, because the hunger that feeds the soul must be paired with its twin: humility.

I. Hunger - the condition of the present

The most dangerous hunger is the one you cannot name. According to Rank, the creative individual stands at a threshold of permanent anxiety. To will your own becoming is also to will your own separateness - to differentiate from the mass, from the comfortable repetition of the unlived life. The price of this courage is loneliness, but the reward is priceless - vitality.

So ask yourself honestly - here and now: What feeds you? Not what you tell others drives you - this is not the narrative you curate. What is the actual nourishment for your soul? Do you dance, as the poet suggests, under the moonlight - or do you only watch others dance, believing the night was never meant for you?

What is the precise shape of your hunger - and are you feeding it, or merely describing it?

Hunger that is never examined calcifies into resentment. Hunger that is tended - met with curiosity, with small brave acts, with the willingness to look foolish in pursuit of the genuine - becomes creative fuel. The present status is this: you are hungry. The question is whether you know it.

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II. Humility - the posture of the expanding self

Humility is not self-diminishment, as some modern cultures articulate. It is the radical openness of the self that has not yet closed into its final shape. Aristotle approached humility cautiously, preferring the idea of accurate self-assessment. For him, undervaluing oneself was just as mistaken as arrogance — true virtue lay in seeing oneself neither too high nor too low. Augustine saw pride as the original wound of humanity, and humility as its only cure. For Thomas Aquinas, humility was not self-contempt but ordered, truthful self-knowledge. Confucius taught that the person of true virtue does not seek to impose themselves upon the world, but to refine themselves endlessly within it, linking humility directly to the capacity for self-cultivation and inner growth in wisdom and virtue.

On the other side is Immanuel Kant, who warned that we can never fully know our own moral motives. Even our most virtuous acts may be secretly corrupted by self-interest, and this uncertainty should keep us permanently humble about our own goodness. I think, that the deepest layer in the process of keeping the hunger as our inner compass - it is best understood through the philosophical writings of the aristocratic Søren Kierkegaard, who saw it as the gateway to authentic existence. The self that clings to its own certainty and importance remains trapped; only by surrendering before something infinite does a person become truly themselves, and here lies the starting point in Rank’s theory of creativity. Simone Weil wrote that attention - real attention, not the performance of it - is the rarest and purest form of generosity. To be humble is to be genuinely attentive: to others, to the world, to the improbable perfection still slumbering inside you. They understood that the horizon keeps expanding only for those who do not plant their flag in the ground and call it home.

Rank’s genius was to locate the source of all human suffering not in repressed sexuality, not in unconscious drives, but in what he called the birth trauma: the original wound of separation. To fully individuate is to risk the loss of belonging. Rank described the tension between the fear of life and the fear of death as the double bind of the creative person - to remain merged with others is to lose oneself. Humility, rightly understood, is the resolution of this bind - not surrender, but service. When you feed others, you will never be hungry. When you place yourself behind others not from weakness but from love, you become the sculptor, the creator, the guardian of the truth. And, you step onto the path of individuation, becoming who you were meant to be.

III. Dreams, Hopes and the Trick of Destiny

Pandora opened the box. Out poured every affliction the world would ever know - disease, grief, envy, war; and yet at the bottom of the box, clinging to the lid like a breath that refuses to leave: Hope. We live most fully not inside the real, but inside the anticipated. Dreams and hopes expand our psychological time - they stretch the minutes into years, turning ordinary habit into rehearsal for a future that has not yet declared itself.

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Rank was cautious about idealization - he understood that the projected self, the image of who we wish to become, can become our own cage if it is not tethered to honesty. The ideal self is not a prison sentence. It is the song of your soul. The future arrives as reality in a blink, testing our awareness, demanding our presence. The question is whether we meet it as someone who has been preparing - or as someone who has only been dreaming.

Michelangelo believed that the ideal figure already existed inside the block of marble. His task was only to remove what did not belong - to chip away at the stone until the form breathed freely. This is among the most precise metaphors for what love, at its highest function, actually does.

Rusbult, Finkel, and Kumashiro describe the Michelangelo phenomenon: the process by which close partners sculpt one another’s selves, shaping skills, traits, and goal pursuits - either toward or away from each person’s ideal self. Partner affirmation, they found, is not mere encouragement. It is the sustained, perceptive act of seeing our own perfected form in another person and behaving in ways that call it forth.

Between perceptual and behavioral affirmation lies the whole of intimacy. When John sees Mary not as she is, but as she is becoming - and when his behavior creates the conditions in which her becoming is possible - something extraordinary occurs. She begins, incrementally, to resemble her own dreams. And he, in becoming a gifted artist, discovers that the stone teaches the hand.

Rank called this creative self-affirmation of the true self against projected reality. The cry that invokes both the Will to Create and the Will to Be, and here lies the trick of the Destiny. We need mirrors that do not merely reflect but that illuminate - partners who do not see us as fixed and finished, but as beauty still emerging from the marble.

The Pygmalion shadow is here, too. If we affirm in others only the qualities we ourselves wish to possess, we are not sculpting - we are colonizing. Rank’s warning is clear: to foist your own ideal-self representations onto another is not love. It is a projection dressed as devotion. True sculpting requires that we understand the nature of the block itself - its grain, its flaws, its particular and unrepeatable possibility.

Stay hungry. Stay humble.

Stay famished for the becoming; stay small enough to be held.

Nourish that sacred ache with the quiet bread of attention and the brave, small fires of daily resolve. Above all, surrender to the carving - to the friction of life, the heat of love, and the sighted hands of those who recognize the masterpiece living within your unhewn stone.

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Inventory I: The SWAN

Strengths

What do you do with a naturalness that surprises even you? Not what you have been praised for — what you return to, voluntarily, because it makes you feel most like yourself?

Weaknesses

Where do you shrink when you could expand? Not flaws to punish — excess stone to be chipped away. What does your ideal self no longer need?

Aspirations

If fear were removed from the equation entirely, what would you attempt? Write it without apology. The ideal self deserves to be named plainly.

Needs

What must be present for you to grow? Not wants — the structural requirements of your becoming. Solitude? Community? Challenge? Permission?

Inventory II: Existential Audit

Gratitude practice

List three things you have now — tangible realities — that your younger self would have considered miraculous. Hold them without immediately moving past them.

Mirror question

Who are you when no one is watching and nothing is at stake? Not your best self, not your worst — your truest. Does that person still hunger?

The sculptor audit

Name one person in your life who sees your ideal self clearly. Now ask: are you that person for someone else? Where are you affirming, and where — honestly — are you undermining?

Inventory III: Practicing the Michelangelo Effect

Celebrate effort, not outcomes

When someone you love takes a messy, imperfect step toward their ideal self, name it aloud. The intermediate steps are where the sculpture actually happens.

Ask before advising

“How can I help?” is not a passive question. It is the sculptor’s first act — understanding the grain of the stone before lifting the chisel.

Practice patience as a discipline

Growth takes longer than hope imagines and less time than fear insists. Offer encouragement through the confusion. The figure is already inside the marble.

Ideal-self affirmation

Write one sentence describing your own ideal self — not a goal, not an achievement, but a way of being. Read it in the morning, before the world begins to sculpt you according to its own designs.

It took a moment to realize I had stepped into another dimension - light as a baby's breath. Across the table, a serene face I barely recognized was smiling; I had to mark this - the sweetest passage of the fading day, so I ordered an espresso. Just that…

Four hours slipped by unnoticed.

A hidden spring of energy began its quiet, well-planned work. We told each other our stories - not the polished, presentable versions, but the real ones. The cities and countries we had wandered through, the people who had irrevocably changed us. The dreams we had carried, some for years, some still unresolved, arriving in sleep with the insistence of messages. And then the other stories - the strange and luminous ones: those moments when the world seemed to wink, when something appeared at exactly the right time, in exactly the right appearance, and simply could not be explained away. We compared these moments like two travelers unfolding maps, discovering with a quiet shock that we had been tracing the same invisible roads, crossing the same crossroads. Our small revolutions, so strange and private, had arrived in the dark independently - in different corners of the world. Even the name of the hotel - a detail that should have been trivial - landed between us with the weight of something precisely deliberate.

“Kindred spirits...”

The words whispered almost subconsciously, as though a deeper part of me understood what my mind was only beginning to grasp. This was no ordinary meeting; it was a recognition of two souls who had been walking through parallel compressions of space-time and had finally looked sideways at the landscape they were meant to share.

There was no more fitting place for this than Plovdiv - the oldest European city, the keeper of twelve ground layers, continuously inhabited for eight thousand years. A city that knows something about depth…

I have spent years studying Otto Rank and his vision of the creative will - the Rankian insistence that the soul has a longing of its own. Rank’s central thesis is that the human being is not primarily a biological creature but a theological one, driven by a need for eternalization. Modern psychology fails, he argued, when it treats us as machines to be fixed rather than as spiritual beings seeking meaning in the full awareness of our mortality.

And yet, in that café, with the espresso cooling and the music playing, all theory dissolved into something simpler. What remained was older than any framework - the ancient, wordless recognition of having found someone you were always going to meet. Jung called it synchronicity. But sitting there, I felt it first as something far simpler: grace.

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Jung’s Word for It

You have felt it before. Perhaps not in a café, but somewhere - in a phone call that came the moment you were thinking of someone, in a book that fell open to exactly the text you needed, in a stranger’s words that answered a question you had not yet spoken aloud. You felt it, paused, and then - because we are trained to distrust such things - you moved on.

Carl Gustav Jung gave this feeling a name. He called it synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle, a meaningful coincidence between an inner state and an outer event that cannot be explained by cause and effect alone. Two things happen simultaneously, and between them - in the silence between them - there is only meaning.

Jung was careful not to call it magic - he was a scientist, after all. But he was also a man who had spent decades descending into the depths of the human psyche, and what he found there convinced him that the universe is not indifferent. That it speaks - not in words, but in events - not in explanations, but in resonances.

The concept emerged slowly in his thinking, sharpened through decades of clinical practice and his own inner life. He observed that when patients reached critical turning points in their inner work, the outer world seemed to respond - a symbol would appear, a person would arrive, a dream would illuminate the waking situation with uncanny precision. The boundary between inside and outside grew thin. This is not coincidence in the ordinary sense - the kind we brush aside with a shrug and the word random. A coincidence that carries glowing weight - one that leaves a residue. You return to it in quiet moments, still hesitant to explain it, yet certain it meant something. That it had to.

“Synchronicity is an ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see.” - Carl G. Jung

The important word in Jung’s formulation is meaningful. Synchronicity is not about frequency - it is about significance. Not every coincidence qualifies. But when one does, you know it in your body before you know it in your mind. There is a stillness, a click, and the sensation of something locking into place. That afternoon in the café, our stories kept finding each other, rhyming across the table in ways neither of us had arranged. I wasn't reaching for sophistication. I was only recognizing, without argument - something that was simply true, and had no interest in being otherwise.

Were You Ready?

Jung names the phenomenon. But Rank asks the harder question: why now?

Otto Rank understood the human being as a creative will in perpetual motion - not driven primarily by instinct or conditioning, but by the soul’s own need to express, to become, to leave a mark upon the world that says: I was here, and I was more than what I was born into. For Rank, we are not passive recipients of life’s events. We are, at our deepest level, artists of our own existence - whether we know it or not. And artists, he would say, do not encounter their greatest works by accident. They ripen toward them.

There is a kind of inner readiness that precedes the synchronistic events - a threshold state, a point of becoming so concentrated in one’s own unfolding that the universe, as though sensing the ripeness, sends precisely what is needed. Not what is comfortable or cozy and familiar, but what is necessary for the next step in the creative becoming.

I had been in such a threshold for some time before that afternoon. Years of studying Rank had brought me to a place where his ideas were no longer merely academic — they had become lived questions. What does it mean to will your own existence rather than merely endure it? What does it mean to face the pain and the beauty of individuation without collapsing into either conformity or isolation? These were not rhetorical questions. They were the questions I was carrying daily, the way one carries a stone in the pocket - present, weighty, cut, but strangely grounding.

I know, you are carrying your own stone. And in the meeting of our stories, I see something that Rank knew well: that the people who arrive at our thresholds are often mirrors. Not flattering mirrors that show us what we want to see, but true ones — that show us who we are in the process of becoming.

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The encounter was a mirror of my own unfolding. The other journey reflected back to me the shape of mine - confirming not that I had arrived somewhere, but that I was flying above the right road. That the questions I was living were the right ones and the ripening - real. This is Rank’s gift to the understanding of synchronicity: it is not merely a cosmic event - it is a developmental one. The meaningful meeting arrives not randomly, but at the exact moment in our inner life when we are capable of receiving what it brings.

The Thread in Your Own Life

If you sit quietly for a moment and let your memory move - not searching, just allowing - you will find them. The meetings that should not have happened but did. The arrivals that changed the direction of everything. The moments when someone walked into your life at the precise instant when their presence made sense of something you had been unable to understand alone.

I have found, in my own life, that these meetings form a thread. Not a straight line - life is never a straight line - but a thread nonetheless. A red thread, as the old metaphor goes, running through the labyrinth of years, connecting the moments and places that mattered most.

And always, looking back, I can see that I was ready. Not comfortable - readiness and comfort are rarely the same thing. But ready in the Rankian sense: standing at a threshold, poised between who I had been and who I was becoming, my inner world concentrated and alive and quietly calling out for exactly what arrived.

But I invite you to look again - not to impose meaning where there is none, but to notice the meaning that is already there, patient and waiting to be seen. The thread does not announce itself, it reveals itself only in retrospect, when you have gathered enough of the moments to lay them side by side and see the pattern. And when you do, something shifts - the past stops feeling random, the future stops feeling arbitrary.

What Synchronicity Asks of Us?

A synchronistic moment is not a gift to be unwrapped and admired and set upon the shelf. It is a summons. The universe - or the psyche, or the creative will, or whatever name you give to the force that arranges these rhymes - is not speaking for the pleasure of speaking. It is asking something of you. Most of us - if we are honest, hesitate. Because to take the synchronistic event seriously is to accept that we are participants in something larger than our daily plans, and this participation requires courage.

Rank speaks about this fear intimately. He explains it the life fear and the death fear - the twin anxieties that hem the human soul: the fear of losing oneself in merger with another or with life itself, and the fear of isolation, of standing too fully in one’s own separate existence. Between these two fears, the creative individual must navigate - not by eliminating them, but by moving forward through them.

The synchronistic meeting is precisely such a moment of willing. When a kindred soul appears, when the outer world rhymes with the inner in a way that cannot be dismissed, we are asked to do something difficult and simple at once: to show up. To be present not with our polished, managed selves, but with the full truth of where we are in our becoming. To let the meeting unfold naturally.

This is what it means to live synchronistically: not to chase signs or manufacture meaning, but to remain open enough that meaning can find you. To cultivate the kind of inner attention that notices when something bountiful arrives - and then, crucially, to respond. To speak the words that rise unbidden from the deepest part of you and to trust that the thread, once felt, is real. That the conscious, creative aliveness is the only answer Rank ever offered to the tragedy of being mortal and aware of it.

The Circle Closes: Return to the beginning, now luminous

The espresso was long cold and we had not solved anything. We had not arrived at conclusions, we had simply been fully present. I thought of something Rank wrote about the encounter between souls - that genuine meeting is not the merging of two people into one, but the moment when two individuated beings recognize each other. Not fusion, but Recognition - the shock of the familiar in the face of a stranger. The ancient sensation that the Greeks encoded in a single word: anagnorisis - the moment of recognition that changes everything. This is what had happened in that café. Not a beginning, exactly. More like a remembering.

Déjà vu, we call it. The sense of having been here before. But perhaps it is not a glitch in memory. Perhaps it is the soul’s way of signalling that something important is happening — that this moment is one of the moments that counts, that the thread running through your life has just become visible again, briefly, before disappearing back into the weave.

I walked out of that café into the amber afternoon carrying something I could not name and did not need to. The city held its breath around me. The streets were full of ordinary people living ordinary moments, and I moved among them with the strange lightness of someone who has just been reminded of something essential - that life is not random, that the soul knows its own, and that grace, when it arrives, arrives without warning and without apology, and asks only that you be awake enough to receive it.

The meeting was over. The meeting had only just begun.

“The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Albert Einstein

The Existential Tension

We begin – always – in the middle of things. Not at the origin, not at the end, but suspended in the tension between what was and what might yet be. This is not a philosophical abstraction – it is the lived condition of every human being who has ever drawn breath and wondered why.

Western culture has long sought to resolve this tension – to cure the restlessness, to name the wound and close it. But Otto Rank, that lonely Austrian visionary who dared to break with Freud at great personal cost, had a more radical understanding: the tension itself is the source. It is generative. It cannot – and must not – be philosophically resolved.

Rank’s insight was that the postmodern person does not suffer from too little certainty; they suffer from too little willingness to inhabit uncertainty creatively. The burden of finding ground where there is no land, of seeking meaning in hopelessness while negotiating with the paradoxes of the infinite – this is not pathology. This is the human vocation.

Where psychoanalysis sought to dissolve inner conflict through interpretation of the past, Rank proposed something more daring: the cultivation of will – not as domination, but as creative engagement with the whole spectrum of one’s existence. To accept your will, he wrote, is to engage with a powerful innate impulse to live.

The River of Time – Psychological and Quantum

Time, for Rank, is not the clockmaker’s metronome. It is a living, porous medium – one in which past, present, and future do not stand in strict succession but interpenetrate one another in ways that mirror the discoveries being made in his era’s physics laboratories.

In the early twentieth century, as quantum theory was dismantling classical causality, Rank was doing the same within the psyche. He observed what physicist Hugo Bergmann was articulating in 1929: that causality itself might be reversible – that later events can exert an influence upon earlier ones. In psychological terms: the future pulls us forward with a force as real as any past wound.

Rank spoke of “the pulling force of the future” in psychic reality – a concept that Jungian analysis had already intuited from its beginnings. The therapeutic encounter, in his view, does not excavate ruins. It navigates a field in which past memory, present will, and future possibility are simultaneously alive. This is not a metaphor; it is the actual topology of consciousness, with Kant’s three dimensions of time – possibility, actuality and necessity – finding their psychological echo here. What we remember is not the past as it was, but the past filtered through the present moment’s desire. What we anticipate is not the future as it will be, but the future as it must be, given who we have chosen to become.

Will Therapy as a Contemporary Life Guide

Rank’s Will Therapy is one of the most underread masterworks of the twentieth century – a guide not merely to healing, but to living. Its central claim is quietly revolutionary: authentic therapy is possible only when the present moment is fully inhabited. Only there, in the charged space of now, can transformation occur.

Forgetting, Rank argues, is not failure – it is liberation, because we do not remember what our will does not wish to sustain. And we do not abandon the past out of cowardice – we release it because, as he writes with rare tenderness: ‘we are no longer there.’ Something happened, once, in the backward country of time – but we have moved. We have become.

The therapeutic relationship, in Rank’s vision, is not a clinical procedure but an intimate encounter – creatively saturated, alive with presence. When client and therapist meet fully in the here-and-now, something can arise that Rank called, simply, truth. Not interpretation. Not diagnosis. Truth, that rare event when two selves touch, and a moment of genuine understanding is created.

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This is Rank’s gift to the contemporary seeker: the permission to live forward. To carry the past lightly, as a lantern rather than a chain. To let the future exercise its quiet gravitational pull toward who you are still capable of becoming. Psychology, he insisted, cannot be something frozen in time – it is always in dynamic motion, like the soul, like the seasons of our life.

Causality, Truth, and the Synchronistic Field

The question of causality has haunted every serious thinker since the Enlightenment insisted that effects must follow causes in orderly procession. Rank, in dialogue with the new physics of his time, proposed a richer picture. Causal explanation, he argued, is always simultaneously historical – and because it is historical, it is always interpretive. We see the past only in the light of the present moment.

This is not relativism. It is something more precise: the recognition that psychic reality operates in a different register from mechanical nature. The soul does not follow Newton’s laws. It follows something stranger, more intimate, more alive.

Jung’s synchronicity gives us language for what Rank was circling: the possibility that events separated in time and space can be connected not by cause and effect but by meaning. The universe, at its deepest level, may be a meaning-making field as much as a mechanical one – and consciousness participates in that field actively, not passively.

Truth, for Rank, is not a static possession but an existential moment. It lives in the symbolic dimension — emotional, unconscious, available to those willing to descend past the surface of rational explanation into the deeper waters where myths and dreams still speak. The impulse toward creativity, he believed, is present from the first breath – rooted in the phylogenetic inheritance of myth, legend, parable, and symbol.

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The Paradox of Multiple Worlds

We live, each of us, in several worlds simultaneously. There is the world of the past – not as archive but as living presence, still breathing in memory and reflex and dream. There is the world of the present – immediate, sensory, charged with the full weight of being here. And there is the world of the future – not prediction, but orientation, the direction toward which the self is always leaning. Rank saw in this multiplicity not confusion but spring of creativity. The self is not a fixed object but a permeable, dynamic gestalt – always part of something larger, always in transformation. Like the quantum particle that exists in superposition until observed, the Self holds multiple possibilities open until the moment of choice collapses them into actuality.

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The existential unconscious – that deep reservoir Rank recognized beneath the personal – nourishes the individual’s capacity to remain relatively independent of the volatility of external conditions. It is from this ground that genuine creative personality can emerge: not despite the paradoxes of existence, but through them. Rollo May, who walked the path Rank had cleared, understood that the individual requires not certainty but myth – an inner narrative rich enough to sustain selfhood through the contradictions of a world that does not resolve. The great myths do not offer solutions; they offer a second Self along the path to the mystery.

Synchronicity as Coexistence

We end where we began: in the middle. But now the middle feels different – not as impasse, but as intersection. The crossing-point where past memory and future possibility meet in the present moment’s creative act.

Otto Rank gave us, a century ago, a psychology ahead of its time – one that quantum physics is only now beginning to theoretically confirm, and that the depth psychology community is only now beginning to fully inhabit. Its core message is both ancient and urgently contemporary: you are the author of your story. Not its prisoner. The will to create – that powerful innate impulse Rank placed at the center of all genuine living – does not ask for perfect conditions or a resolved past. It asks only for presence — and the willingness to inhabit that tension not as a wound, but as authentic experience, and a joy of becoming.

Where Freud saw the human being as a creature driven by unconscious and often unnamed forces, Otto Rank finds something more profound: a creative will that shapes, creates, and ultimately authors its own healing. The therapy room, as I imagine it, is not a laboratory of analysis - it is an atelier, a studio where two human beings meet in order to experience genuine bonding in an art form - where becoming oneself begins.

The context of your pain is an invitation for a journey, not a treatment.

It’s time-travel.

I. We Are Not Our Pain. We Are Deeply Connected Through It.

Nietzsche wrote in Die Geburt der Tragödie that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified. Notice: not explained, not cured — justified. And, your pain, seen through the lens of the aesthetic is a phenomenon that belongs to a larger story — your family, the tribe, culture, or the native place. I remember the woman who was not able to mourn her mother as inside her soul was the buried memory of her grandmother who was never allowed to grieve. Or, the man whose rage seemed disproportionate carrying inside the silenced fury of a lineage.

In my practice, I always begin here: not with “what happened to you” but with “who are you within?” You are not an island of suffering, you are an estuary — a meeting of many rivers. When we start mapping those rivers together, something shifts and the valley suddenly becomes a paradise. The shame of individual failure gradually evaporates and dissolves into the dignity of the conscious awareness about our shared human complexity.

“The life of the individual is, at bottom, a constant becoming.”

— Otto Rank, Will Therapy (1936)

Now, consider Marta* – I met the choreographer in her late thirties who came to me saying she had “lost her creativity.” As we spoke, it became clear that she had not lost anything — she had inherited a silent stillness (later in life, turning into Rheumatoid arthritis). Her mother had been a singer who gave up performing after marriage, her grandmother (a poet) whose notebooks were burned during a wartime evacuation. Marta was not blocked. She was carrying. Once she understood herself as the living continuation of interrupted voices, destined to silence, her inspiration returned — not despite the pain, but through recognizing its many faces.

II. Time as a Landscape You Can Walk Through

When we find ourselves in a deep crisis, it’s often the precise sensation of not knowing whether this feeling belongs to the past we are still living in, the present that is collapsing, or the future we can no longer imagine. I often ask the client to locate their pain on a timeline. Not metaphorically — literally. Is the wound in the past? The present? The impossible future? Recently I received an answer – “all three, simultaneously, and that is what makes it unbearable”.

In my experience, one of the most powerful questions in such cases relates to the subjective perception of our own psychological time: Where, in time, does your wound live? As science has already proven that time is not linear, and the profound wisdom of the Rankian approach confirms — these dense feelings are experienced as a parallel reality you move through, appearing at the gate of a strange habitat still blocking the border towards the present.

I call this therapeutic time-travel: the conscious, willed re-entry into a moment in the past not to be victimized by it again, but to meet it with the creative resources of the mature self. Meister Eckhart, that radical Dominican mystic, spoke of the Seelengrund — the ground of the soul — as a place outside ordinary time, where healing is always already possible. Seelengrund is explicitly described as supra-temporal (outside ordinary time): the uncreated, supra-temporal ground of the soul that provides an experience of God. I am not so mystical in my attitude, but I honour that intuition: there are layers of the self that time has not touched, and from there, every moment of your life remains available for revision.

III. The Body Knows, and So Does the Spirit

Marsilio Ficino, the great Florentine philosopher of the Renaissance, wrote in his De Amore that love is not sentiment but a great cosmic force, the very energy by which the soul recognises itself in another. I am speaking of the therapeutic relationship as one of the few places in modern life where this Ficinian love — attentive, non-possessive, genuinely curious, giving — still operates. The body is not a passive vessel carrying a suffering mind — it is a co-author of the story. Wilhelm Reich understood this before he lost himself in other directions, and Rank definitely stepped onto Ficino’s ground: the body is the spiritus made dense, the place where the soul’s unfinished business becomes visible.

Otto Rank’s approach attempts to bridge the splits like conscious/unconscious, rational/emotional, past/present, and individual/relational. He recognizes that healing requires integration of these formally divided aspects of experience. This holistic orientation is evident in his therapeutic focus, which encompasses not only the client’s emotional experience, but also their cognitive understanding, relational patterns and existential concerns. He also recognises the immanent creative potential as a genuinely transformative force.

Striving to reach the relational, step by step, we encounter the passage through the somatics. Where in your body does this pain live? Not metaphorically — literally. The tightness behind the sternum that arrives when you think of your estranged child. The nausea that comes before you enter your office. The strange lightness in your legs when you stand at a gallery looking at a painting that undoes you. These are not symptoms to be managed - they are the maps of your chosen identity.

And then there is the nocturnal. The dream, the half-sleep vision, the image that arrives at 3am uninvited. Jung gets credit for this territory, but Rank arrived there first — and differently. For me, the night-self is not merely compensating for the day-self; it is the Will speaking in its most undefended voice. What does your soul tell you in the dark that your daylight mind refuses to hear?

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When I ask clients this question, the light in the room changes. Something drops. The performative layer — the “I’m fine, I’m working on it, I know what my issues are” — falls away, and we are suddenly in actual contact with the living wound. That’s the condition where the real work begins.

“The neurotic suffers from an excess of will — he wills too hard against himself.”

— Otto Rank

IV. Your Artistic Hunch Is Your Remedy

Schiller wrote that it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom — durch die Schönheit zur Freiheit. I have spent my life believing this, and my therapeutic practice is built upon it. Not through analysis alone. Not through interpretation alone. Through beauty — that is, through the encounter with form that exceeds explanation. When I ask you what art form speaks to your condition at a particular moment, I am not being whimsical. I am asking you to locate your problem in a symbolic language larger than any symptom.

Does your crisis feel like architecture — structural, weight-bearing, something fundamental in the design? Or is it cinematic — a story with a protagonist who keeps making the same inexplicable choice? Is it musical — a dissonance between two themes that refuse to resolve? Or sculptural — something hard that must be worked from the outside, removed layer by layer, until the form inside is revealed?

Michelangelo said he saw the angel in the marble and carved until he set him free. I give this to every client who is willing to receive it: You are the marble, and inside you, the form your work is trying to become is already present — it requires not force, but the patient, willed separation from that which is not it.

Lena, a philosopher and academic, came to me after the publication of her first book — not in triumph, but in collapse. She had poured everything into the work and felt, on the day of publication, not satisfaction but grief. Lena had grown up in a house full of music that was never played. The piano in the hallway, lid closed, was the central object of her childhood. And now she had written a philosophy of beauty without once being able to describe beauty as something she felt in her own body.

We spent three sessions trying to understand it through language alone. Then I asked her: if this feeling were a piece of music, what would it be? Without hesitation: the second movement of Schubert’s last piano sonata. Slow. Unresolved. Heartbreakingly beautiful. And unfinished.

There it was. Her grief was not for the book she had written. It was for all the books she had not yet written — the vastness of what remained — what Schubert told us in seconds, and three counseling sessions had not. This magical piece of music was recognized by Lena as ultimate truth and instant revelation thus unlocking her inner self-healing.

V. The Therapeutic Relationship: Love as Attitude

Rank emphasizes the importance of therapeutic communication as a key factor in the relationship with the client. The idea that authentic therapeutic exchange transcends mere verbal content to encompass the deeper dimensions of relational experience, anticipated later developments in psychotherapy. Here I speak about communication phenomenon emerging beyond the conscious awareness. Rank advocates for an empathic stance that contrasts sharply with the analytic neutrality. The effect of the “beyond” manifests as the therapist attunes not only to what is said but to what is communicated beyond words through presence, timing, insights or emotional resonance.

Here is where Otto Rank most radically departed from psychoanalysis. The analyst behind the couch, the patient exposed and supine — this is a theater of power, dressed in the language of healing. Instead, Otto Rank offers what Ficino would have recognized immediately: a mutual encounter. Two human beings, each bringing their entire reality into the room.

I am changed by my clients. I must be. If I am not, then I am merely administering, not truly present. Renaissance thinkers revealed the ultimate truth that love transforms both parties. Ficino’s amor was never one-directional. It was always a circulation, a mutual enlivening. It is the recognition of the other as irreducibly real.

This does not mean I have no boundaries - it means that within that structure, I am genuinely here. I bring my full attention and my actual care. I do not pretend to objectivity — I offer you the more valuable gift of presence and creative freedom. When Novalis, the German Romantic poet, wrote: “Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren / Sind Schlüssel aller Kreaturen” — when numbers and figures are no longer the key to all creatures, he was calling for a different epistemology, one in which the heart has equal authority to cognition. I operate from this stance - your emotional truth is no less real than your factual history. It is, in many ways, much more real.

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VI. From Graphite to Diamond — The Alchemy of the Will

Carbon becomes diamond under pressure. That pressure is not the obstacle. That pressure is the condition. The Will — not as grim self-discipline, but as Rank’s creative force, is what allows the pressure to produce form rather than fracture. This is chemistry, yes — but it is also the most precise metaphor for what happens in genuine therapeutic work. You have been stressed and compressed by grief, heavy obligation, or by the expectations of others. But above everything, you experienced the most judgmental voice ever heard: your own. And that pressure, that very pressure, is the condition of your transformation — if you can turn toward it with the will to create rather than the will to escape.

The Will, as defined by Otto Rank, is not willpower in the ordinary sense — the grim determination to be better, do more, suffer less. The creative Will is somewhat closer to what Dante felt when, having descended through all the circles of hell, he looked up and saw the stars again. It is the capacity to say: I have been here, in this dark wood, and I will create myself again.

Not despite the pain. Through it. Not in spite of the wound. Because of it.

This is the context I offer you. Not a room where your pain is managed and reduced, but a context — a full, richly dimensioned space in which your pain is honoured, examined, expressed, related, timed, and in the spirit, given an artistic form, and finally, willingly, transformed.

You are unique and valuable. And your task, should you choose to accept it, is to transform the graphite into a diamond.

A final question — for you, the reader:

If your current pain were a work of art — in any medium, any tradition, any era — which work would it be? Sit with that question. Do not rush to answer it. Let it find you. And when it does, you will already have begun…

* All the names in the text are fictitious

I listened until the emotions evaporated and asked her something quieter: ‘What are you afraid the painting might say?’ She went completely still - the stillness of someone who has just been found.

That is what a real question does. It does not seek information. It seeks contact.

Not All Questions Are Easy

We ask questions all day long. Most of them are about gathering data or checking information: What time is the meeting? Did you call the doctor? These are useful as they organize the practicalities. But there is a profound difference between questions that explore and questions that illuminate. Questions that reach backward into cause, and questions that reach inward toward authentic feelings. ‘What is happening inside you right now, as you tell me this?’ illuminates.

Rank’s will psychology rests on the present moment where everything happens, and that’s why we look for the active attitude in the client. Not in the archive of the past or some subconscious frozen feelings. The emphasis is right here, in the encounter between two people who are both willing to be present and be changed by it.

The Question as an Act of Will

When I ask you a question that truly matters, I am doing something bold. I am asserting that your inner life is worth exploring. That what you feel and fear and secretly long for - all of it deserves a voice.

This is, in Rank’s language, an act of will - yours. Because when a question cracks something open in you, you still have to choose whether to step through that opening or move back. The question creates the door, but only you can decide whether to creatively examine the distance ahead and walk through it.

I have seen people receive a question like a gift and immediately wrap it back up. I have also seen a single question dismantle three years of careful self-protection in sixty seconds. Not because the question was clever, but because the person was ready - ready to stop explaining or wander around, to start feeling themselves. In such a case, the question is the catalyst, and the client’s will is set on fire.

What Makes a Question Transformative?

Over many years of work with creative people, I have noticed that the questions leading to the critical point in the client’s attitude share certain qualities.

They are present-tense. Not ‘why did you...’ but ‘what do you notice right now?’ They bring the person into contact with their immediate momentum rather than stepping back into the story from the past.

They are specific. ‘How does that feel?’ may lead the client anywhere and nowhere. ‘Where do you feel that in your body right now?’ directs the focus on real sensations, drives, impulses. Specificity creates intimacy and trust.

They come from genuine care, not from a well-known working pattern. In this case a person can feel the difference immediately. If I ask because I truly want to express empathy or stimulate spontaneous and relaxed self-reflection that lands differently. It lands gently.

They honor emotional truth over intellectual coherence. Sometimes the most transformative question seems irrational. ‘If your silence had a color, what would it be?’ It bypasses the thinking mind and goes straight to the imaginal, creative, and feeling self - the self that actually knows the truth.

They do not demand an answer. The greatest questions are ones you can sit with for days, weeks, a lifetime. They are not just problems or challenges, but territories to be inhabited and conquered.

The Courage to Ask and the Courage to Receive

When I ask you something that truly matters, I am making myself vulnerable too. I am saying: I see something in you that I want to understand. I am willing to be surprised, moved, even unsettled by what you discover. “I am here for you...”

Rank understood this at the heart of the therapeutic relationship - not relying on a particular technique or theory, but looking for a genuine encounter. The therapeutic dialogue unfolds authentically when people, both willing to be present, both willing to be changed, are equally responsible.

I think of self-inquiry the same way. When you ask yourself a real question, you are offering yourself the same gift. This is the gift of being truly met without rational explanations or artificial politeness - the courage of being creative that is, most probably, the ongoing process of individuation.

Questions as Creative Acts

Otto Rank believed that the artist and the counselor are doing the same work: they make the invisible visible, giving form to what is formless, voice to what is silent, and shape to what is felt but yet unknown.

It brings something into being before you asked it. Not the answer - the awareness, the moment of recognition with the sudden sense of: Oh. Yes. That is exactly what has been living in me.

Writers do this on the page. They ask questions through their characters and silences between the lines. Artists do it with color and form - posing a question that cannot be spoken, only felt. Musicians do it in the pause before the movements within the composition or in the note that bends toward something unnamed.

And you - in your inner life while journaling, in the quiet moments of honest self-reflection - you are doing this too. Every time you stop and genuinely ask yourself “what is true for me right now?” you are practicing the highest form of creative inquiry.

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When You Are Both the Asker and the Asked

One of the most powerful things about self-reflection - the kind that Rank’s work quietly invites one to perform - is that you carry the both roles at once. You are the one who asks, and the one who must answer.

This is harder than it sounds. Because the part of you that asks is often braver than the part that must answer. The questioner in you is curious, alive, willing to go anywhere. The answerer in you is sometimes frightened or ashamed, and sometimes so accustomed to silence that finding words feels impossible.

What I have found in my work with others and in my own life, is that the kindest thing you can do for yourself is to ask slowly, giving time and space for the inner journey. To let the question settle in you like a morning light entering a dark room gradually, revealing what is there without blinding you with it.

Rank called this respecting the will of the other. When I ask you something, I must also respect your right not to answer, especially not to be forced to open before you are ready. Real transformation is never coerced - it is invited, again and again, until the person finds their own courage to step through.

Be that patient with yourself.

The Question That Lives in You

I believe every person carries myriad questions at the center of their creative life. Not a question about craft or technique or what to make next. These are questions that your whole body is oriented toward, even when your mind is not aware of its worn-out illusions.

For some people it is like: Am I allowed to take up this much space? For others: Can I be truly seen and still be safe? Or: What do I actually believe, underneath all the things I have been taught to accept?

Your creative work is, in many ways, your attempt to answer that question. Everything you make is part of the response.

Rank called the artist someone who does not merely “paint” the life but someone possessing the Will-to-meaning. And the question lies in the very beginning - in that moment when you ask yourself truly, honestly, without knowing the answer in advance, the moment when you begin to create.

So let yourself be cracked open. Gently. Curiously. On your own terms. The question is already alive in you. You only need to give it permission to speak.

Exercise: The Art of Asking Yourself

This week, you are both the counselor and the client. Practice asking yourself questions that honor your emotional truth - not to find answers, but to deepen contact with your own inner self.

Day 1: The Question Beneath the Question

Think of something you are currently struggling with - a creative block, a decision, a relationship. Write down the obvious question about it (’What should I do?’). Then ask: ‘What is the deeper layer underneath this one?’ Keep asking until you reach a point where you feel slightly uncomfortable. That is the real question.

Day 2: The Present-Tense Inquiry

Set a timer for 10 minutes. Sit quietly and ask yourself only this: ‘What am I feeling right now - not what I think I should feel, not what I usually feel, but what is actually present in me in this moment?’ Write without editing as long as it takes. Let the answer surprise you.

Day 3: The Body’s Question

Choose a creative project or life area that feels stuck. Instead of asking your mind about it, ask your body. Close your eyes and place your hand on your chest or stomach and ask: ‘What does my body know about this that my mind has not admitted yet?’ Stay with it and give enough time for the answer to emerge. The answer may come as an image, a sensation, a single word, a sudden emotion. Trust whatever arrives.

Day 4: The Imaginal Question

Ask yourself one of these questions - the one that makes you most uncomfortable, because that is the one that belongs to you:

If my creative life had a sound right now, what would it be?

What am I making that I have not yet admitted?

What would I create if no one I knew would ever see it?

What is the painting, the book, the song, the step I am most afraid to make?

Day 5: The Question You Have Been Avoiding

Write down a question about yourself that you have been carefully not asking. You know the one - it has been waiting at the edge of your awareness for weeks, months, maybe years. Write it down, but you do not have to answer it today. Just give it the dignity of being seen.

Day 6: Ask Someone You Trust

Invite someone close to you into a different kind of conversation. Instead of exchanging information, exchange genuine questions. Ask them something you truly want to understand about their inner journey. Invite them to ask you something real in return. Notice how different this feels from an ordinary conversation you usually have with that person. Notice what may become possible.

Day 7: Your Central Question

Journal freely on this: ‘What is the central question of my creative struggle right now?’ This might not be the question you think you should be asking - the one you are actually living, the one your work, your dreams, your deepest resistances are all, in their different ways, trying to answer. Write it down and sit with it. Let it be as large and as unresolved as it truly is.

At the end of the week, reflect: Did any of these questions crack something open? Did anything surprise you - a feeling you did not expect, a truth you had been carefully avoiding, a longing you had forgotten? You do not need to resolve what you discovered. You only need to acknowledge it.

Acknowledgment is the beginning of everything.

Rank believed that consciousness - real, embodied, present-tense awareness - was itself a creative act. Every time you ask yourself a true question and stay with the answer openly, you are practicing the most fundamental form of creation there is.

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