Why is the work of great artists so great? Because it deals with the same thing in a radically different way. Van Gogh didn't paint different sunflowers, he looked at them with different eyes. Which also made him paint them differently. Outrageously different. Unprecedentedly different. And therefore so reviled in his time. Because different and deviant: the world hates it.

And yet this very Corona crisis calls for different, different, unworldly, thinking and doing. Proclaim yourself an artist of life and take your chances.

How? By approaching the same words and feelings that every person knows differently. Learn to treat them like clothing.

Scared, angry, lonely or sad? Of course, you can be. But that doesn't mean you have to put on that feeling. You are not forced to be drawn by it.

Therefore, don't automatically put on what most people are already wearing. What is in fashion. Lay your anxiety pants, panic shirt or worry skirt down on your bed, spread them out and let them tell their story. Not in silence, in "thought," but by writing them down and then reading them aloud. This will prevent them from secretly developing into an ulcerous wound to begin with.

After which you "only" listen to what you hear yourself read. Like you would listen to a good friend in mourning telling his story for the thousandth time.

Take your time. Sit, be still and become present to what the speaker in you, the listener in you is offering. Without any rebuttal or commentary. Just as the sea proclaims no opinion about a burst of rain.

The miracle that happens to you then: as if from heaven, new garments are handed to you. Fresh, fresh, life-giving thoughts and feelings. Which do not come from a booklet-"think positive"-but from the heart of your being.

Depressed, anxious, restless? Think Rembrandt or Van Gogh, Stravinsky or Bach: skill yourself into hearing the same thing differently, seeing it differently. You can learn to do that here.

If you can sing with the angels you would be crazy to keep crying with the wolves, wouldn't you?

And the people stayed home.

And read books, and listened,

and rested and exercised,

and made art, and played games,

and learned new ways of being,

and were still.

And listened more deeply.

Some meditated, some prayed,

some danced,

some with their shadows.

And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed.

And in the Absence of people

living in arrogant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,

the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again,

they grieved their losses,

and made new choices,

and dreamed new images,

and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully,

as they had been healed.

Kitty O'Meara

On his way to work, a social worker in New York drops off his children, twins of one and a half, at the nursery every day. Until one fateful day he forgets to do so. Which he only realizes when, after work is done, he sets out to pick them up. But the city is weighed down by a heat wave that day. Left in the back seat of the car, the children overheated and died.

First reaction: this can't be right! How can you forget something like this? But yes, this is possible. In fact: it happens more often. It has already happened to hundreds of parents. And the pattern is always the same: one goes shopping or to work and forgets, having arrived at the destination, to have forgotten the children.

Forgot to have forgotten. Double that. This is how the brain can work. Not only do we make a mistake, but also that we make that mistake is erased from our consciousness. Until something or someone wakes us up.

The psychological explanation: when we perform familiar actions, such as driving the same route, we turn on autopilot. This allows us to do several things at once. Like driving a car and having a conversation at the same time. But for this we pay a price. The part of our consciousness that reminds us that we had planned to do something else, too, locks up. We forget that we still have children in the car for the same reasons we may forget to run errands on the way home. Even though we had resolved to do so. Stress and fatigue also play a role in this, by the way.

A father who forgets to have forgotten his children. It is deeply tragic. But if possible, it becomes even more tragic when we realize that we are experiencing here in a small way what is commonplace in a large way. Because in a similar way, we all too often function on autopilot. And even then there are casualties to report. Albeit less tangible and visible. Because in the backseat of our own existence, our unique meaning is thereby lost. Who and what we really are. Our individual "I," but especially our mystery "I": that and what makes us human. The question mark within us.

In our zeal to do the right thing, to do things right, we stifle what makes us capable of doing. Eager to think the right thing, we kill our consciousness more than to be "thought right.

Climate devastation? Let's talk about self-destruction....

'The great Tao fell into oblivion. Humaneness and righteousness made their appearance. Sagacity came into prominence - the great hiccup took hold'. Words of Lao Zi, from the sixth century BC. Freely translated: forget to make time and space for the unknown that underpins your existence, and you place yourself outside of it. Become a "fake" version of yourself.

It is a central element in Liber coaching methodology. Learning to activate the "not-knowing," the question mark in yourself. Which is as much as daring to start respecting it as such. Not filling it in. Not with anything. And then to give it an active role in your actions.

'So strange, like I'm just starting to live now' is how someone who had practiced Liber for a few weeks described what happens as a result. But it is not that strange. For nowhere do we experience our core meaning better than in precisely the question mark. In the emptiness of our not-knowing. Open heart, open hands, no idea.

Your most precious possession? Who you deeply are. What you, right now on this earth, are walking around for. Your unique, distinctive gift and meaning. How do you awaken it, how do you keep it alive? See, live and experience how your automatic pilot makes it die every day. It scares you to death. And the living "I" can rise up within you.

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Try the Liber exercises for yourself. You can find them here.

The crucial question with self-driving cars: who programs their ethics?

The same question is the birthplace of the awareness path "Liber. Who is actually at the controls of what you find and feel? And now when you say, 'that is myself,' what or who is this, this 'self'? How free and autonomous is this 'self' to want what it wants?

As little as the self-driving car, Liber finds the "of self-driving man" a sensible thought. That is: man who is not aware of his thinker and thinking as from a distance. Because in that state of being unaware, not your free and authentic, but your programmed self controls you. Which makes you a danger on the road. Because circumstances always arise thereon that were not there at the time of your programming.

Are you constantly driving yourself and perhaps those around you into harm's way? It's not surprising. The "self-driving person" is like a flathead screwdriver tirelessly trying to turn in a Phillips screw.

Home in three steps
"A hack," Stikker taught us, "is an elegant solution to a complex problem. In this sense, Liber, too, is a hack. It takes only three steps to free yourself from an automated attitude to life. First, the recognition that there is more you don't know than you do know, but that nevertheless your knowing determines your life. Next: the verbalization of your well-knowing. Let it express and show itself to the maximum. And finally, step three, practice entering into a completely non-knowing relationship with all your yes-knowing. Learn to relate as non-knowing to your well-knowing.

The outcome: a reset, an update, of your knowing.

So Liber doesn't teach you to go through life without an "I" or "self," but to keep actualizing it. The mysterious, if not mystical thing about it: not another knowing brings what we think we know up to date, but a not-knowing. Bring sister (thinking to) know and so (thinking to) know into conversation and it leads to a hybrid at best. But marry your knowing to your not-knowing, and the child of that intercourse shows true originality and originality.

If you read about self-driving cars or computers that are going to take over from us, in the future, before you judge, ask yourself: how automated am I actually going through life myself?