Rafał: Dear Johannes, you have wonderfully been telling me, during one of our conversations, about

“the garden before the temple". I would like to start our today’s conversation with this sentence.

Johannes: Of course, great. Let me start by saying that Daseinanalysis is quite new, young, maybe 40,
50 years old tradition of psychotherapy that once revolutionized in a way all the psychotherapy,
psychology, and medicine. We have had a great problem since Rene Descartes described our world
and our mankind in a sense of separateness, which means the subject-object split that we have, I am
the subject and Rafał you are the object. I am the object and you are subject. I know that you are the
object, but still - we describe our relationships just from individualistic points of view, as we would be
separated from each other and don't share a common humanity.

This kind of separation, like Descartes prosposed: “we are the masters and possessors of nature” -
was a success in science and technique and so on - but what we see now, that this attitude towards
life and nature brings us - because we are so successful – will bring us in 20,maybe 30 years to the
limits of growth, to the limits of the base that we are living from. So, what we have lost 350 years ago
at least - it marks the insight, it is like the Copernican transformation, it is the human now who is in
the middle. And we would say - wonderful, it is the human in the middle, not God or something like
this. But the problem is that humans are ambiguous, when we talk about human behavior, we mean
something good. If you look at Russia for example or Ukraine, yesterday ten soldiers raped a ten-
year-old girl, this is something an animal would not do. I just want to say, I do not want to blame, I
am not russophobic, I just want to say that we have a very romantic view of what man is. He can be
the worst or the best, it depends on circumstances and a lot of things we know as psychologists.
Coming back to what we were saying about Rene Descartes - he was just framing the worldview that
was evolving at that time - I do not know the real world in English, but in german it is "entgrenzung?"
going over every border, we are reaching out to other continents, we are getting their resources, we
say others are not developed and civilized and that we are bringing them civilization and whatever
and covertly suppressing them. Going over every border - this is the framework we were born in. It
is nothing we have to be guilty or blamed or ashamed of, we are grown up in this mindset, and this is
how we found the world to be. What it neglects, is this framework - to turn back to daseinanalysis -
and what daseinanalysis has found out through thinking using Being and Time by MH, which was the
big influence in the 60s on swiss medicine, psychologists, psychiatrists, and so on, who were all, more
or less, psychoanalysts or psychoanalysts/Jungian backgrounds. They were not content with this.
What they found while treating others and during their own analysis - that it became too narrow,
how we understand mental illness or disorder. Even when we say - psychic disorder - we are in a
cartesian way of describing it. What really intrigued people reading Heidegger was the
phenomenological and hermeneutical approach, to see that the essence of the human being is
Dasein. I say it in German term, because if I say existence, it is also too narrow. Heidegger writes ek-
sistence with a K, to show that there is something different to what we traditionally think is
existence.

Rafał: This ek-sistenz – to show that human nature is ek-static.

Yes, you put it very right. It is ecstatic and Dasein if only really well understood if you see in what
existential dimensions we are human beings. These existentials - they are fundamental, ontological
grounding of the existence. Its mit-sein, being-with the others. I did not make myself. I am always, in
every aspect of my life, always with others, even if I am alone. Loneliness speaks
phenomenologically of the others, of the absence of the others.

So, we are with others, we have been biologically created through our parents and grandparents and
ancestors and we give life if we have children. Of course, if we do not have children, we can still give
life on other dimensions.

It doesn't have to be biological gifts that we give to the world. We are being-with. Then, we have
room, or - we are room, somehow - that means that we - I am sitting now on a chair close to the
table in a room in a town Vienna, Austria, Europe, planet, universe. We can reach out in our mind
because we are existentially a room. We can reach out - if my wife calls me from Tyrole, I am sitting
of course here in Vienna, my body is here, but with my existential presence, I am in Tyrole of course.
You can imagine Solidarność museum in Gdańsk, be there - but you are not physically there, you are
sitting here. So, this means the transcendental/existential dimension. To go further, we have time.

We are beings of time. We are time. Not in a chronological sense. Chronos, the greek god is eating
his children, that's the time when we organize our life, which is important, we couldn't meet, if I am
late, I am sorry because I could not make it to the chronological date we were meeting. This time
gives us the possibility to grow, to meet, to experience, this time between birth and death. This
chronological time, this linear time. There is also another time. The greeks would say - we do not call
it like that in daseinanalysis - but the greeks would say that it is the time of the event, it is the time of
realizing, it is a vertical time when you feel in the moment you touch eternity, we touch in a
moment the time that stays, that is not fading. We are time. The greeks would say it is the Kairos, the
god of the right moment. When the kairos is portrayed in the greek figures, you can find it in Trodia,
in Croatia, they have a wonderful picture of Kairos, this is a god who walks naked through time, with
a knife in his hand, he has some hair on his forehead, he is bold on the back, like me. He goes
through time with this knife and it is up to us to grab him!

To grab the right moment, to be awake, being awake. It's like in the Buddhist term of the awakening -
we are now here, we are totally here and everything is here, just everything. If I am just neglecting
time, let's say, I am chasing time away (zeitvertreib?) somehow, I can never come to the moment of
the Kairos because time is something that doesn't speak to me. I want to fill it with actions or
entertainment, but this is nothing I can do where I can really be awakened and look who I am in the
moment now. This time - where does it come from? It comes, phenomenologically, we do not have a
religion or a concept behind it, phenomenologically, it comes out of nothing. We can see it comes out
of nothing and it goes into nothing, like our life. You are being told that you are born and cared for in
a hospital - I do not know and you do not know. If you look into your beginning, you will remember
two or years old, first memories. Somehow we come out of nothing, of course, there is biology, but
existentially, we come out from nothing and we go there when we die, if you accompany a person
who dies you will experience that - you hold her hand, and the last breath and somehow the soul,
the presence, dasein - falls back into nothing, phenomenologically speaking. It is just the corps that is
there, still warm, you would still say that is my mom or whoever, but you will immediately know that
this is just the warm corpse of this person. You will bury her or burn her or whatever and then we
make a memory at the graveyard to remember her presence, her dasein, but she is not there, and we
know this. We know that but it is not important, you can burn yourself and throw your ashes into the
ocean, but this is a question of what you want to be for your children or whoever, I think they would
like a place to commemorate, I a not a fan of burning and dispersing someone's ashes, not because
of myself but because of the others ( but this has nothing to do with DA of course). We are not only
the body, the problem is in the English language that we speak of ourselves as the body. In german
we have a body - Korpe, which is the physical and the existential body is Liebe, we could say life. They
are two different terms. Heidegger says about Lieblichkeit, I have to look at how it is translated. The
difference is that my body is here, but not my life is directed to the point over there, so my body is
here, but my lifely (existence?) is over there, with the birds. I can be bodily here, but lifely I can be
absent.

There are many existential dimensions. Language is another one. We are language. As you
remember, in the Bible, in the beginning, there was a word. The word is not a linguistic term. The
word and response are the fundamental movements of the logical word. Sprache/language is more
fundamental than Rede/talking. Even if you listen to me now, we are language, because language is
speaking, listening, understanding, and responding. Everything speaks. Now, the wonderful
background of your room speaks to me and I refer to it. So everything is language, also. Even before
we can talk, it is the language that brings us to life - if my mother and I couldn't talk, she would
probably hold me in her hands and keep me warm and sing something to me - I am in the language,
that is how I learn the language, even if she doesn't teach me that like in school. The language of
caring, the language of being a human, that is unlike animals in the necessity to be brought up in a
warm atmosphere, be touched, being talked to, which is completely different to animals, who are
born like being ready to go, more less, not like we, human beings. We are mitsein, being-with, which
is something totally different, although we share a lot of genomes, would say 98 percent we share
with the monkeys. But it is not the point, this is not a genetic question of whether we have
developed out of evolution. That is not a problem. This is an existential issue. We are existentially
totally different. Animals are instinctively bound to their surroundings. So we have a lot of
dimensions. Now, to answer your original question about the garden before the temple.

This will be something that I see this way. It is not a common scene in daseinanalysis because we are
all so different, we come from different points, and we have agnostics and atheists, and believers as
therapists. I am a believer, but my belief just makes me sensitive to these things. I also put it "" when
I am a psychotherapist, I would not say that to the client whether I believe or not believe. How I see
it is to experience Dasein, for the first time to see who I am, and I am not a subject or an object, this
is already a misconception, you know that a huge part of science and the practitioners are narrowed
by this very narrow way of seeing it. To experience Dasein, for the first time, my past in not just past,
it is gewesen, it is still open for change. And also the future - it depends on how we intend (to it?).
What is always - is gewesen- and what comes always - is answered it the now. That is - I think - the
mystery of psychotherapy, that is why people can change when they realize how they want to live,
how to actualize what was in the past. Do I want to be a victim, or do I want to be in a constant
conflict with that, or do I want to give it a new future - who I am. I think that is the reason why we
help as a psychotherapist and I see that also as a preparation for what you could call a mysterious
ground of being. Mysterious in a way, because it does not show itself.

What is shown is only what exists. The fundament of this existence goes back to nothing because I
trust that we are out of nothing every moment of my life. Religion says that we are in hands of God,
it is a nice picture. You are unique in god, but phenomenological means that we are here with others
in time as a transcendental, always transcending existence and this time and room (sein und zeit) is
always given.

You needn't be too religious, but that is why I see the connections, even Heidegger didn't speak
about that, but I think that he was rethinking the whole tradition of philosophy and giving it a new
description. I think he would intend to do this, but without speaking about it because he would not
be understood. He would prepare the field where you can believe or you can not believe, but if we
look through the all tradition of the world, and ancient traditions, they all are the answer to the
mystery of the Dasein. I cannot think of a single culture that has not developed this. They have
stories about it, myths, gods, and different forms of religion, but this is not the essence of what I was
saying. Even if you are in a religion, Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist - you have to start with a Dasein. If
you don't start with Dasein, it will become superficial. You do not have to know it intellectually, you
do not have to be a philosopher, you have to understand it by the way you are. By a true existence.

True existence is a garden before the temple.

Rafał: Thank you, Johannes, it has been a great expierience talking with you, thank you for your
teachings.