Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: self-awareness

  • Theme:

    Double Cowboy

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    At the airport, I saw a man wearing two cowboy hats stacked on each other.
    Obviously, this was for safe transportation, but it begs the question:

    Does wearing two cowboy hats make you doubly cowboy or completely clown?
    Does doubling down create a double negative: the inversion of intent?

    In doubling down on identity markers, you move into the realm of affectation, pure aesthetics and costume, which denies authenticity. At such a point, overt self-awareness becomes excess and emerges as a parody.

  • Theme:

    Mirroring conversations into identity

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    We mirror conversations in our head: we take in what is said and replay it (like an infinite mirror) to give ourselves an image.

    In repeatedly gazing (incessantly) at the "self-made-of-words," we begin to believe the illusion when it is only a momentary fragment of a possible you.

    Our reflection is not who we are but who we have allowed ourselves to become.

  • Theme:

    Clever you causing pain

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Your clever flippancy is callous: check your heart before you open your throat or let your fingers fly.
    Always engage sympathy first; always feel before you say.

  • Theme:

    Tolerance and Fragility

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Tolerance is said to build resilience. If so, do like-minded bubbles create fragility?

    Tolerance is allowing without indeed agreeing or being in alignment. This is a practice of maintaining oneself as aloof or separate from reality, a protected kernel of you.

    Fragility is expecting reality to align with your beliefs and mesh yourself with the world: there is no defensive layer of protection.

  • Theme:

    If tolerance = resilience then group-think = fragility

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Tolerance is said to build resilience.
    Then like-minded bubbles produce fragility.
    Are you remaining comfortable and weakening yourself, or are you challenging your assumptions?

  • Theme:

    Mimetic Desire Training

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    You don’t want what you want. What you wish for has been introduced to you.

    Take control of your mimetic desire by choosing to love what you have and surrounding yourself with a reinforcing group that values perennial values.

  • Theme:

    The wolves outside the door

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    What if there is no wolf outside your door?
    What if the only wolves are inside with you?

    What if all of your external paranoia need not exist and no one outside actually cares one whit about your meager fiefdom?

    What if all of your problems and pain are caused by your own wolves tearing you apart from the inside?

    Tend to your own wolves, tend to your own wounds before looking outside of you for the cause of your problems.

  • Theme:

    The Human Barometer

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    My body is so sensitive to weather pressure it affects my mood: downward pressure depresses my mood, causing anger and headaches.
    We are environmental creatures, often reacting to cues so subtle we are unaware and only able to understand that odd personality with sympathetic hindsight.

  • Theme:

    We don’t learn from mistakes

    , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    If we learned from mistakes, we wouldn’t keep making the same ones repeatedly.
    We learn from reflecting on the mistake and making a plan to behave differently. When we fail again, we have gained insight into one more way not to do a thing.

  • Theme:

    Processing is not thinking, belief is not a function

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    A computer is a processing machine. Not a thinking machine.
    It subordinates all things into processed information, anything unmeasurable becomes unimportant.
    "Belief" is not a function, yet we now consider what you do (measurable action) to be the equivalent of what you believe (ideological stance).

    This linguistic supplantation through analogy -allowing processing to appear as thinking or belief to become simply a function- separates a complicated set of interwoven connections for simplistic measurables: provable feats aligning us to technology and away from humanity.