Hello, and what a joy to meet you.

 

My name is Haim Tor, a 35-year-old 

 philosopher, artist, and a Guide for Self-Understanding.

 

I was born and raised in Kiryat Motzkin,Israel,

in a religious-Zionist family.

 

I was a sensitive, introverted child,

and a teenager who struggled with excess weight -

finding it difficult to understand

where I belonged within the accepted framework.

 

But I wasn’t a rebel.

​

I had no desire to break the rules,

but rather to comprehend what they embody -

and who I was in relation to them.

​

I sought meaning within what was presented to me as truth.

 

I would withdraw, seek solitude, read -

 and think about the things behind the things.

 

I lingered on subtleties,

trying to name phenomena,

and observe how words shaped my inner world.

 

I noticed the more honest I was with myself

the more ease and freedom I felt -

and the more I could become otherwise.

 

Because of the background I came from

and the complexity of my family circumstances,

I lived a life filled with loneliness, heaviness, and sorrow.

​

I could not find a healing explanation for what I felt,

and I asked myself: "How could this be all there is?"

​

One day, near the end of my yeshiva studies,

as I watched the prayer shawls flutter in the air,

I asked myself:

​

"What’s the difference between the moment before I lay Tefillin -

and the moment after?”

 

Before the ritual, I felt the weight of an unfulfilled duty;

afterwards - a sense of relief for having done what was required.

 

I realised that the difference between before and after

lay in the emotional approval I gave myself

for performing the act -

and that its meaning came from me.

 

That its authoritarian power was enforced by my own imagination -

which turned the ritual into a self-recurring symbol,

meant to conceal what I had excluded from understanding.

 

This insight later gave birth to a series of questions

that changed my life:

​

"Who made you believe in Jehovah - more than you?"

 

That was the first question.

 

I searched for an answer, and found none but this:

no one did.

 

 I then tried to challenge myself further:

What if there were someone or something

that made me believe in Jehovah more than me?

 

I replied with another question:

"Who made you believe in that someone or something -

more than you?"

 

Every attempt to project responsibility outward 

 brought it back to me.

 

Thus I saw that my beliefs were not external truths

I was bound to hold,

but inner validations  -

born of my own agency in experiencing reality.

 

I understood that Jehovah was not an essence,

but a representation of emotional and cognitive need.

 

What deprives a person of well-being, I realised,

is not dependency itself -

but the denial of the difficulty it seeks to soothe.

 

When I’m disconnected from the part of me that recognises this,

it appears external - and thus generates inner duality and conflict.

 

It took at least another decade,

filled with transformations and different versions of myself,

before I could finally sit down and write what I had come to understand.

 

I saw how often I felt fear in varying intensities -

even though, culturally, I had been taught that fear is a negative emotion to be conquered or suppressed.

 

I noticed it wasn’t only me.

That every hurtful behaviour is a universal response

to an unprocessed fear.

 

And yet, for some reason, our culture largely denies this experience -

and thus finds itself helpless in the aftermath of its denial.

 

I witnessed that denial generates a universal structure of

inner dynamics creating endless entanglement -​

but that it also dissolves entirely

the moment we honestly recognise its origin.

 

This is how Self Understanding was born.

 

 Our lives are not something to overcome.

We don't need to erase or silence any part of ourselves -

but to meet ourselves in Wholenessness.

 

The Attendness offers a playful and gentle exploration,

acknowledging the natural gaps within human experience,

and allowing inner unification and expansion

through the recognition of fear.

​

Fear, Self Understanding suggests,

is an inner signal that we’ve reached the edge of our personality -

inviting us into a wider, wholofied reality.

 

I invite you to engage with a consciousness-based Attendness

that is alive, ever-changing, and evolving from moment to moment -

just like reality itself.

 

To discover the harmonic connection within,

and the healing artist we already are.