I live on a metaphorical, “big yellow school bus.” The thing is mostly full of children of various ages, characters made of beliefs and emotional states who seem to be trapped in mental cages of their beliefs and emotions… and the battles those traps induce with the others on the bus.
There are a few riders, however, who are looking out the windows for clues in the Real World. Try as they may to keep themselves uninfected by the contagion around them, these riders sometimes throw up their own overreaching ego defenses. They become contaminated with the same sort of corruptions they see in the others and would give their eye teeth to avoid.
The observing ones know that what the believing ones think of them is irrelevant to their actualized, enlightened parts, but also fear being judged, abused and ultimately “excommunicated” (abandoned and left all alone to fend for themselves, after all). They have gotten off the bus before and walked home, but they forget that they can do so. They are as conditioned to believe that they will go crazy if left all by themselves as the others are.
The difference is, the observant ones recognize this, while the “believers” in the other seats do not. But occasionally slipping on banana peels of sudden “awareness” (or paranoid projection?), and caught in the neediness of their memories of having been very small – and physically helpless – children, the observers cannot get entirely unstuck from their insecurities. And they are not sure that those insecurities are either conditioned, socialized, normalized and “customary,” or truly a part of their biological makeup and therefore "natural."
Their “mental health” is far “better” and more comfortable than that of the others on the bus. The observers are not mired in the overwhelming, paranoid delusional and abject, borderline terror of being abused or alone that was so before they existed, and the bus was filled with nothing but “emotional believers.”
But having gone “too far” out on a limb of self-(mis)-I-dentification and expositions of “complete competence” (not) when threatened by the bus-borne bullies, the empirical observers start to lose their self-confidence… and self-esteem… and collapse (at least for a while) into a torturing grind of self-doubt. “Just feel your way back into balance,” they remind themselves. And they do.
But for their paranoid fractions, the (surrogate parental) “monsters” are still just across the aisle. And they wonder if those paranoid fractions will ever completely dissolve.