Belly Button Lint

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Tag: spirituality

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    Once we lived for salvation, now we live for status

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    1–2 minutes

    We went from a loving Father to the Protestants’ God from whom we could not earn salvation (we were all sinners reliant on his grace). As anxious souls unable to control our destiny, we channel insecurity into work: visible virtue.

    Excessive work accumulates wealth, so we flipped the signified and signifier to claim “wealth” as God’s favor and our status through materialism (not spiritualism or kindness).

    Our insecurity drove us into the arms of a more capricious, uncaring, and taxing God: Money. The comfort of the trade is the objective measure of our salvation, which proves most of us unworthy once again.

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    Describing vs. Explaining

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    1–2 minutes

    We tend to explain how something works to describe what it is.
    We can break it down into categories and measurements, but this pretends to be understood without clarifying or enlightening.

    We need to know how something fits into the world more than we need a fact sheet.

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    You are a puppy

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    1–2 minutes

    The nature of consciousness is open, accessible, curious, and unconditionally loving. If we can let go of the chatter in our heads (insecurity, anxiety, and problem-solving), our inner puppy can come out to play.

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    Unhooking the problem solver solves problems

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    1–2 minutes

    The helpful problem solver in your head connects ideas, plans for the future, and draws conclusions from the past. Because it won’t shut up, we think the chatterbox is who we are, but that is our "small self."
    If you can ask yourself: "what is here now when there is no problem to solve?" you can relieve the problem solving and tune into greater awareness.

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    Trapped by passion

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    1–2 minutes

    You follow your passion into the art world, where your curiosity and ambition drive you to learn and grow. Soon every problem’s solution is more thoughtful art.
    Like religion or capitalism, every crisis is an opportunity to have more faith: enact more rituals, dig deeper, try harder.
    Your passion has trapped you. You have traded love for myopic fanaticism.

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    Transcending backward

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    1–2 minutes

    To make something onerous on purpose is to grant it value.

    To have the music streaming is easy, but the devotee transcends backward. They take pleasure in the obeisance to vinyl; investing in the cumbersome physicality and lavishing more attention until the “music” is a ritual.

    The soft, easy has become a caring, hard.

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    To kill a symbol don’t fight it: trivialize it

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    1–2 minutes

    The true believer and the blasphemer share the power of the symbol: a reverent or desecrator both act from fervent belief.
    While irreverence can be an antidote to weaponized piety, what truly kills the sacred is to make it abundantly commonplace, from whence it is trivialized into the secular.
    Watch commerce parasitically affiliate with the sacred until the transcendent transforms to tchotchke.

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    Magic is Anti-egalitarian

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    1–2 minutes

    Magic is in you, you can’t become magic.
    Technology, on the other hand, promises empowerment through application and effort.
    However, technology often becomes anti-egalitarian by limiting access, rendering it’s promise back into the realm of magic.

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    Science and religion are more similar than science and engineering

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    1–2 minutes

    Science and religion are trying to discover how the universe works, while the engineer is trying to make things work. One is swathed in mystery while the other is purely utilitarian.
    (Ted chaing on the Ezra Klein podcast)

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    The benefit of irrationality

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    1–2 minutes

    To be unique we appear irrational against the norms of society. But norms shift to abnormal in another place or among another group.
    To encourage unique individuals we must enable the ability to pursue irrational ideas. After all, unique ways of thinking from irrational pursuits may be our salvation.
    Yet, knowledge and strange ideas, without wisdom can promote destructive tendencies and harmful outcomes. How do we balance against this?