IJSP Number 4, 2022

57 experiences learned while going through our existential path. As such, we mean an active encounter with time and not just aging passively while clocks are ticking and time goes by inexorably. By aging one has the chance to evolve and develop qualities, ideas, feelings, or experiences that tend, if actively encountered and fully integrated in the structures of personality, to enlarge our view of life in general, of us and other, and, last but not least, of what humans face and struggle with on that road less travelled called existence, destiny, or life. And there can be more to aging, namely the wonderful and almost miraculous possibility and process of the differentiation of the self. By implementing that, one detaches oneself from the infantile emotional involvement and childish dependencies by which our understanding and judgement are narrowed; a non-differentiated person is still a prisoner to a childish approach to life and its complexities because it hmmm lives in a narrow conceptual universe that limits one’s worldview. To engage oneself on such a path, absolutely necessary for psychologists, and therapists, or supervisors, one has to come up with interrogations concerning one’s own existential status. University studies and training programs can be of great help in such an endeavour, although only on a more theoretical level, one that can facilitate the maintenance of an exploratory direction and give some structure. School can offer us the know-how, but it cannot help us apply it in particular or specific life situations which are very real and concrete, and usually ask for quick and, more often than not, easy solutions. Knowledge is a tool, and it can be a very sophisticated one, but just possessing a tool does not enable the use of it not to mention the mastery level. Every tool has a specific purpose and can be used for a specific task – psychology and psychotherapy included. But how to make the best use of such a powerful tool, as psychology really is, and how to become a master in the field is not something that universities, trainings, books, smart papers, or international conferences can teach. The mastery level can be only achieved by practice, and by a very specific kind of practice. There are in fact two types of practice: one, and that is the most common approach we encounter in layman and professionals alike, is the passive direction for which one just has to be there and let time, experience, confrontations, or life lessons sink in and imprint their mark on one’s own psyche/mind or behaviour. This passive approach will leave a mark on the involved person, but that mark cannot be more than a stereotypical envelope stuffed with cliché-istic and ready-made know how, having as background the theoretical skeleton and framework universities teach generation after generation. On the other hand, there is a more active approach to practice, and life practice in particular; one that is capable to assume meta-positioning and objective interrogations concerning existential questions such as destiny, freedom, ethical involvement, meaning of life, mortality, anxiety, or dread and life’s deep noetic sense, and so on. Amazingly, psychologists or their supervisors usually don’t ask such noetic or existential questions; usually they are not preoccupied with the existential questioning or the noetic aspects of life – probably because the psychological problems of their own life and that of their clients’ are sitting in the front row of their mental hor izon (and, more than that, in many cases, they don’t even touch at main or deeper psychological issues as it is the case with the cognitive-behavioural