IJSP Number 4, 2022

56 orientations are built on a shaky and vague ontological status borrowed from the standards of modern scientific recognition and acceptation levels, does not mean that we should exclude or ignore more subtle spiritual issues. The fact that these issues have not been materialized yet or read by our sophisticated machines or computers does not mean that they can be ignored, swiped under the carpet, or put aside by everything that is mainstream or recognized as being scientific. As psychologists, therapists, and supervisors it is our moral and existential duty to extend our viewpoint beyond the modest perspective schools can offer and manuals can teach. Let us not forget that beyond immanence there always is, somewhere in the background, some type of transcendence, even if we don’t see or understand it at first glance. What is needed in order to become a good and understanding therapist and a high level and wise supervisor is the personal deep involvement in life and its possible multi-layered and complex experiences. It is to be observed that the real learning, meaning learning for life, is really beginning after schools, universities, or trainings are left behind. With them of course, every stiff, didactic, and narrow viewpoint has to go, even if it is a scientific one, belonging to the mainstream of that particular field or branch we were studying – psychology in our case. Why would that be so? Is it possible that a psychologist or psychotherapist is invited by his professional and humanistic approach to go out there where life takes place instead of staying in his study? Therapy is not, after all, about books, professional papers, theories, or batteries of tests, international conferences – life is bigger, larger, and deeper than the stuff schools and universities are concerned with. Unfortunately, universities are, more or less, out of touch with life itself, and that is already something built-in and prescribed by their program, curriculum and institutional structure; on the other hand, without such a separation and differentiation, between them and the world outside, they would not be able to function or to teach. Such a limitation is a blessing and a curse at the same time and, above all, it is something unavoidable – at least from the point of view of an institutional, pedagogical and social policy program. Universities cannot prepare people for life; they just prepare them for a particular science or a field. And we should not forget that psychologists as well as their supervisors, have a university education behind them, and that comes with all its advantages and blessings but also accompanied by all its strict limitations and narrow-mindedness. Not even training in psychotherapy does prepare its students for life itself, considered as the encounter with the concreteness and specific problems humans can accuse, but again, and once more, just for the practical applicability of a specific branch of psychotherapy (which is even narrower as a field, although much deeper than the more general psychology learned at university). In this point of our discussion, we may ask about what, if not the university or the training programs, can prepare for life? The answer to that question is obviously simple, and at the same time, not easy to understand. Only life can teach and prepare for life (and such a thing cannot be learned in school). Although such an answer seems to be more or less tautological, if not simplistic and pretty obvious, it has a deeper layer imbedded at its core, namely the time factor. We do not want to consider the objective time of our clocks or watches, but rather the effects and marks time, and more specifically age, can leave on us, on our lives and our