mask of sanity
Some people think they don't know me, i can't agree more, i don't even know myself. In fact, i don't believe anyone in the world truly knows anyone, not even themselves. Some tell me that there are people who can pluck thoughts out of their mind, who can finish their sentences and know exactly how they feel, what their thinking. That is just understanding abit of their personality and mostly guesswork.
After all, are you even sure you know what you think? what you believe? Are you sure that whats going on in your mind isn't really just a lie to yourself? When you lie, lets say a white lie, when you tell yourself you're doing the right thing, are you sure its right, or is it just self deception? Are you even sure that the rights and wrongs we percieve are truly right and wrong
We are affected by every single "input" we recieve. It is not just words or events or actions, its everything. Everything from the way the colours in your vision move when you shake to how your foot falls upon the ground with every step. We are shaped by what we do, see, hear, know, guess, assume, perceive, believe, hope for - everything.
In a Darwin style of saying it, we evolve. Our personalities are not inborn, we aren't born with a certain persona thats supposedly God-given, it is as we pass through life and its experiences that our mind adapts and creates its own persona. With every word and action, mistake or success we grow something upon ourselves, the lessons we perceived to have learnt are imprinted somewhere in our mind, changing us gradually as we experience more.
Each new "lesson" we learn with time and experience is just like adding clay or scotch tape to our personality to smoothen it out to what seems the "rightest" to ourselves, to people. To some the scotchtape on our mask shows more, with others maybe the clay works better. Either way we always have something hidden from someone behind our masks, we always have different traits to show different people. We are different in some way to everyone we meet. We cannot help it, it is natural to keep some feelings, thoughts and emotions to ourselves, to show traits the person is friendliest with. Baring everything to anyone is like giving your life up, your identity, you keep nothing for yourself, no secrets, no comforts, you lose your life. As much as we hate to admit it, it is the secrets we keep that makes us feel special, alive, unique because we think only we know it, because its your secret and yours alone. If someone else knew everything about you, that person could become you, just more because they have their own secrets.
As we build our mask(s) we lose track of ourselves, that is if we actually know ourselves, or an "ourselves" even exists. We are affected by everyone, how they speak, how they move, how they talk, look, portray themselves and we are also influencing everyone else - no matter how slightly. We subconsciously follow things that work, and give up things that don't. Before you even realise there was a start to your personality's development you're already mired in your experiences and can only watch it in the midst of its growth - and it never stops.
Many feel that they want to be true to each other, to everyone, they want to bare their heart and lay their minds open for all to see and pick through. But what they lay out can only be their mask, for your true personality, the true decider of thoughts and creator of dreams within us is not so easily accessible, it is our soul, the thoughts that represent the most basic of our primal instincts. These simple "functions" affect every emotion, every thought in an exponential fashion due to all the connections in our minds. Every action affects a thousand thoughts and every thought is affected by a thousand actions in an infinite matrix of interlinked experiences that in the end describes our souls and creates our faces. The best a person can do is to show the face that best expresses our soul for that is the deepest we can dig into ourselves before we get lost in endless contemplation and insanity. They say that humans are the most sophisticated, intelligent creatures on Earth, perhaps thats the explanation to why we cannot even understand ourselves.
Human communication (as many self-help, self-improvement books suggest) is not limited to just words but also gestures, body language, dressing and as we are affected by every such thing, it is not hard to believe that all the faces we own, or are, are such complex tools and that we are thus multi-faceted deep inside where ideas strike our soul and is intepreted infinitely like a kaleidescope of feelings and ideas. People say "stay true to yourself", I ask "which self". Many grouse how they feel they are caught between sides, how they cannot choose, thats probably because they can't decide which "mask" they truly are, or want to follow. After all some choices mean we have to give up masks, and that means damaging relationships we had nurtured with those masks. Remember how some people say they lose friends upon marriage? Thats one such choice.
Even as i type this i wonder about the people who will read this, the different people i know who know me by my different faces and who see me in different lights and angles, attitudes and stereotypes. As i type this my mind has conflicting, clashing ideas and formulations, "will this make so-and-so pissed?", "should i really say this?", "won't who-and-who think this is directed at them?". It is hard to think linearly, it is hard to decide what i want to write, what i wish to show and tell for this is ultimately a post on my opinions, not a thesis of facts and theories. It is just how i feel, what i think.
As much as i have refered to our personalities as a montage of different masks, i believe that rather than masks we can actually call them parts of our faces, the hardened, altered skin that protects our fragile souls that are still part of us, still what we are. We cannot always take the truth, cannot always tell it, so we protect ourselves. We steel ourselves beneath all our layers of beliefs and "truths" and hopes and lies and we tell different people different things to prevent hurting them or ourselves. We do it because we care and worry.
We go through all this trouble because we are human, and so we know that it hurts and stings, sometimes unnecessarily, to hear the truth. So we lie. So we show our different sides. And so when we look at others we understand that the face they show you, they do it because they need to. Because thats the face they feel the most comfortable in with you, because they think its the face you are the most comfortable with with them, its how we adapt.
Do not lie that you've never lied, our lives are made of lies, on lies. As negative as the word is, its implications are not, it is an unavoidable sin. When we decieve ourselves and others and let personalities be built upon that, they cease to be lies, they become truths to us because that will be our perception and then we create our own ideals and beliefs based on it. That is how we live and think, so don't feel like an evil, mean, two-faced sinner when you next talk to your different friends differently. As long as you know that that face is what you and those people are happiest with, it works.
Or at least thats what i perceive.
Jesus was sinless, we're not Jesus.
After all, are you even sure you know what you think? what you believe? Are you sure that whats going on in your mind isn't really just a lie to yourself? When you lie, lets say a white lie, when you tell yourself you're doing the right thing, are you sure its right, or is it just self deception? Are you even sure that the rights and wrongs we percieve are truly right and wrong
We are affected by every single "input" we recieve. It is not just words or events or actions, its everything. Everything from the way the colours in your vision move when you shake to how your foot falls upon the ground with every step. We are shaped by what we do, see, hear, know, guess, assume, perceive, believe, hope for - everything.
In a Darwin style of saying it, we evolve. Our personalities are not inborn, we aren't born with a certain persona thats supposedly God-given, it is as we pass through life and its experiences that our mind adapts and creates its own persona. With every word and action, mistake or success we grow something upon ourselves, the lessons we perceived to have learnt are imprinted somewhere in our mind, changing us gradually as we experience more.
Each new "lesson" we learn with time and experience is just like adding clay or scotch tape to our personality to smoothen it out to what seems the "rightest" to ourselves, to people. To some the scotchtape on our mask shows more, with others maybe the clay works better. Either way we always have something hidden from someone behind our masks, we always have different traits to show different people. We are different in some way to everyone we meet. We cannot help it, it is natural to keep some feelings, thoughts and emotions to ourselves, to show traits the person is friendliest with. Baring everything to anyone is like giving your life up, your identity, you keep nothing for yourself, no secrets, no comforts, you lose your life. As much as we hate to admit it, it is the secrets we keep that makes us feel special, alive, unique because we think only we know it, because its your secret and yours alone. If someone else knew everything about you, that person could become you, just more because they have their own secrets.
As we build our mask(s) we lose track of ourselves, that is if we actually know ourselves, or an "ourselves" even exists. We are affected by everyone, how they speak, how they move, how they talk, look, portray themselves and we are also influencing everyone else - no matter how slightly. We subconsciously follow things that work, and give up things that don't. Before you even realise there was a start to your personality's development you're already mired in your experiences and can only watch it in the midst of its growth - and it never stops.
Many feel that they want to be true to each other, to everyone, they want to bare their heart and lay their minds open for all to see and pick through. But what they lay out can only be their mask, for your true personality, the true decider of thoughts and creator of dreams within us is not so easily accessible, it is our soul, the thoughts that represent the most basic of our primal instincts. These simple "functions" affect every emotion, every thought in an exponential fashion due to all the connections in our minds. Every action affects a thousand thoughts and every thought is affected by a thousand actions in an infinite matrix of interlinked experiences that in the end describes our souls and creates our faces. The best a person can do is to show the face that best expresses our soul for that is the deepest we can dig into ourselves before we get lost in endless contemplation and insanity. They say that humans are the most sophisticated, intelligent creatures on Earth, perhaps thats the explanation to why we cannot even understand ourselves.
Human communication (as many self-help, self-improvement books suggest) is not limited to just words but also gestures, body language, dressing and as we are affected by every such thing, it is not hard to believe that all the faces we own, or are, are such complex tools and that we are thus multi-faceted deep inside where ideas strike our soul and is intepreted infinitely like a kaleidescope of feelings and ideas. People say "stay true to yourself", I ask "which self". Many grouse how they feel they are caught between sides, how they cannot choose, thats probably because they can't decide which "mask" they truly are, or want to follow. After all some choices mean we have to give up masks, and that means damaging relationships we had nurtured with those masks. Remember how some people say they lose friends upon marriage? Thats one such choice.
Even as i type this i wonder about the people who will read this, the different people i know who know me by my different faces and who see me in different lights and angles, attitudes and stereotypes. As i type this my mind has conflicting, clashing ideas and formulations, "will this make so-and-so pissed?", "should i really say this?", "won't who-and-who think this is directed at them?". It is hard to think linearly, it is hard to decide what i want to write, what i wish to show and tell for this is ultimately a post on my opinions, not a thesis of facts and theories. It is just how i feel, what i think.
As much as i have refered to our personalities as a montage of different masks, i believe that rather than masks we can actually call them parts of our faces, the hardened, altered skin that protects our fragile souls that are still part of us, still what we are. We cannot always take the truth, cannot always tell it, so we protect ourselves. We steel ourselves beneath all our layers of beliefs and "truths" and hopes and lies and we tell different people different things to prevent hurting them or ourselves. We do it because we care and worry.
We go through all this trouble because we are human, and so we know that it hurts and stings, sometimes unnecessarily, to hear the truth. So we lie. So we show our different sides. And so when we look at others we understand that the face they show you, they do it because they need to. Because thats the face they feel the most comfortable in with you, because they think its the face you are the most comfortable with with them, its how we adapt.
Do not lie that you've never lied, our lives are made of lies, on lies. As negative as the word is, its implications are not, it is an unavoidable sin. When we decieve ourselves and others and let personalities be built upon that, they cease to be lies, they become truths to us because that will be our perception and then we create our own ideals and beliefs based on it. That is how we live and think, so don't feel like an evil, mean, two-faced sinner when you next talk to your different friends differently. As long as you know that that face is what you and those people are happiest with, it works.
Or at least thats what i perceive.
Jesus was sinless, we're not Jesus.
posted by slipperdan at 4:04 PM
1 Comments:
well -- sometimes when we have to convince others of something, we need to convince ourselves first. the thing is, it doesn't usually work as well as we think it does. self-denial perhaps? or just a pair of rose-tinted glasses that makes us think that life is simple?
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