How to Learn to See Reality: Fact, Assumption, and the Method of Three Pencils
The series "Psychiatry of One Life" · Andris Saulitis, M.D.
On the source of this material. All the original, source material in this book is exclusively my own. This is easy to verify: for years it has been laid out publicly in my streams and videos on social media, above all on YouTube — more than 1,000 streams and over 3,000 videos. This book is not a retelling of someone else's work, nor a compilation off the internet: it is that same authorial material, arranged, for the reader's convenience, into a digestible, readable form. That is the more honest way — and it is how you can check for yourself.
Introduction. From the author: why this book, and whom it is for
You look into a book — and you do not see the text. Not because you are stupid. Because between you and reality stands an intermediary you never chose and almost never notice. I call it the *Reader (schityvatel)*. And this entire book is about how to catch sight of it and stop being its hostage.
I will say this straight away, without curtsies, because science is science, not a collection of polite reservations. I am a psychiatrist, M.D., with 40 years of practice, more than 20,000 clinical examinations, and thousands of successfully concluded courses of therapy behind me. I do not write from a theorist's armchair, nor from a news feed. I write from the consulting room, where the person across from me is not an abstraction but a living psyche, which I have observed in the most varied states: from health to breakdown and back to health again. This is not boasting. It is a mandate. When I speak of thinking, I speak of what I have seen twenty thousand times.
What the problem really is
Psychopathology is, at its root, not "bad mood" and not "weak nerves." Its axis is a disturbance of thinking: the way the psyche reads reality and what it mixes into it from itself. The healthy person distorts too — but knows how to separate fact from assumption. The sick person does not. And between these two poles lies an enormous grey zone in which all of us live: we look at a text and see our own anxiety; we listen to a companion and hear our own fear; we read the world — and fail to notice that we are reading not the world but our own projection.
This is the problem of the Reader. It is everywhere. It is the root of everyday conflicts, political splits, family tragedies, and half of what brings people into my consulting room. And it is also the thing that can be cured by a method, not by a pill.
Write to me personally. I do not hide behind the text. Through the vitamodo.store system you can write to me directly — with a question, with a disagreement, with your own case. I am a doctor, and I am ready to answer. I will leave this door open throughout the whole book — and I will remind you of it wherever I explain something.
My intention: this is my contribution
This book has one central intention, and I will state it plainly. This is my contribution and my attempt to explain the essence of the problem — so that on its basis one can build more precise and more honest solutions. I do not claim the last word. I claim clarity at the beginning: if we have understood the nature of the problem wrongly, then any of our "solutions" will be treating the wrong disease.
That is why this book is not only for the patient and not only for the fellow psychiatrist.
Whom it is addressed to — and why precisely them
This book is written also for those who create artificial intelligence. And for those who want to devote their lives to the problem of education. I address you directly, because you today are the ones building new "Readers" for billions of people. Every model, every learning system, every interface teaches a person how to read reality. That is a colossal responsibility, and it cannot be carried blind to the nature of the problem itself.
I address also those who build systems like Claude — because I believe we are doing one and the same work. Anyone who seriously builds AI and seriously thinks about education sooner or later runs up against the same question as the psychiatrist at the bedside: how to tell fact from assumption, knowledge from experience, signal from noise. That is our common ground. I extend my hand: take my forty years of observation as material, as a clinical substrate for your solutions. Not as dogma — as a foundation for a conversation.
Write to me personally. If you are building AI or education and you need a clinical view of how the psyche reads reality — write to me through vitamodo.store. I answer living people with a living word.
Why this is the foundation of mental hygiene
Everything I describe is not philosophy for philosophy's sake. It is the foundation of mental hygiene. Just as there is hygiene of the body — washing your hands so as not to carry in an infection — so there is a hygiene of thinking: learning not to carry your own assumption into reality and not to take it for fact. The health of the psyche is not issued once and for all. It is built daily, brick by brick, by your own decisions. The Method of Three Pencils, to which this book is devoted, is precisely that daily instrument of hygiene. As simple as a thermometer. And just as honest.
What this book is — and what it is not
This is not a collection of motivational quotations and not esoterica. There will be physiology here, there will be clinical fact, there will be terms — exactly as many as are needed to be precise, and not one more, so that it stays clear. This is an instrument-book: first I will show you the disease of the Reader, then I will give you the method, then I will teach you to apply it to your own life — to anxiety, to guilt, to relationships, to that flood of information in which we are all drowning.
I will speak boldly. Not for the sake of shock, but because half-tones are harmful here: when the subject is how a person loses contact with reality, polite vagueness is a form of lying.
How to read
Read straight through — the book is built as a staircase: why → how → where. But if all you need is the instrument, open Part II and begin with the Method of Three Pencils. You can always return to the theory later.