For millions of years nature embedded in us notion that past can teach us a lot about future. This is very useful for survival. And it is also mostly true with inanimate objects. With humans story is less straightforward: it is reasonable to project someone's future behaviour from his past conduct (even though this proves erroneous some of time).

But it is mistaken to project someone's behaviour onto other people's. Actually, psychotherapy amounts to an attempt to disentangle past from present, to teach patient that past is no more and has no reign over him, unless patient lets it.

Our natural tendency is to trust, because we trust our parents. It feels good to really trust. It is also an essential component of love and an important test thereof. Love without trust is dependence masquerading as love.

We must trust, it is almost biological. Most of time, we do trust. We trust universe to behave according to laws of physics, soldiers not to go mad and shoot at us, our nearest and dearest not to betray us. When trust is broken, we feel as though a part of us dies, is hollowed out.

Not to trust is abnormal and is outcome of bitter or even traumatic life experiences. Mistrust or distrust are induced not by our own thoughts, nor by some device or machination of ours – but by life's sad circumstances. To continue not to trust is to reward people who wronged us and made us distrustful in first place. Those people have long abandoned us and yet they still have a great, malignant, influence on our lives. This is irony of lack of trust.

So, some of us prefer not to experience this sinking feeling of trust violated. They choose not to trust and not to be disappointed. This is both a fallacy and a folly. Trusting releases enormous amounts of mental energy, which is better invested elsewhere. But trust – like knives – can be dangerous to your health if used improperly.

You have to know WHO to trust, you have to learn HOW to trust and you have to know HOW to CONFIRM existence of mutual, functional trust.

People often disappoint and are not worthy of trust. Some people act arbitrarily, treacherously and viciously, or, worse, offhandedly. You have to select targets of your trust carefully. He who has most common interests with you, who is invested in you for long haul, who is incapable of breaching trust ("a good person"), who doesn't have much to gain from betraying you – is not likely to mislead you. These people you can trust.

You should not trust indiscriminately. No one is completely trustworthy in all fields. Most often our disappointments stem from our inability to separate one area of life from another. A person could be sexually loyal – but utterly dangerous when it comes to money (for instance, a gambler). Or a good, reliable father – but a womaniser.

The womb is a self-contained though open (not self-sufficient) ecosystem. The Baby's Planet is spatially confined, almost devoid of light and homeostatic. The fetus breathes liquid oxygen, rather than gaseous variant. He is subjected to an unending barrage of noises, most of them rhythmical. Otherwise, there are very few stimuli to elicit any of his fixed action responses. There, dependent and protected, his world lacks most evident features of ours. There are no dimensions where there is no light. There is no "inside" and "outside", "self" and "others", "extension" and "main body", "here" and "there". Our Planet is exactly converse. There could be no greater disparity. In this sense - and it is not a restricted sense at all - baby is an alien. He has to train himself and to learn to become human. Kittens, whose eyes were tied immediately after birth - could not "see" straight lines and kept tumbling over tightly strung cords. Even sense data involve some modicum and modes of conceptualization (see: "Appendix 5 - The Manifold of Sense").

Even lower animals (worms) avoid unpleasant corners in mazes in wake of nasty experiences. To suggest that a human neonate, equipped with hundreds of neural cubic feet does not recall migrating from one planet to another, from one extreme to its total opposition - stretches credulity. Babies may be asleep 16-20 hours a day because they are shocked and depressed. These abnormal spans of sleep are more typical of major depressive episodes than of vigorous, vivacious, vibrant growth. Taking into consideration mind-boggling amounts of information that baby has to absorb just in order to stay alive - sleeping through most of it seems like an inordinately inane strategy. The baby seems to be awake in womb more than he is outside it. Cast into outer light, baby tries, at first, to ignore reality. This is our first defence line. It stays with us as we grow up.