Wherever I go, there I am

We are mostly unaware of the fact that we have ideas about ourselves, and that these concepts are entirely memory-based, and that they comprise a mnemonic veil through which we view the world.

Then we’re beautiful

Personality comes from persona, the Latin word for mask. Masks don’t evolve; they can’t be trimmed, tarted up or traded in. But they can be set aside. Then we’re unobscured. Then we’re beautiful.

Being blind to the mind

One of the things we like about dogs is they don’t give advice.

No name, no story

The human personality is an edifice to the past. It is the conditioned self, the sum total of all of our experiences and of our reactions to those experiences. It’s why some of us are left-handed, others of us stutter, and why Glen Campbell did what he did while drinking like a fish and being unable to read a note of music. We haul this accumulation around with us. We think it is who we are, but it isn’t. It’s just mental and psychological stuff, a moldering pile of bellicosities and beliefs, of preferences and aversions, of memories and habits, of suspicions, traditions and worry patterns. It is good, now and then, to drop this congealment. To draw a breath. To see a bird without naming it.

When my heart is outside of me

The personality is a set of conditioned behaviours based on past experience. It is an accretion of memory; it functions as an individualized protective device. As personality dictates, some men habitually fight, other men fawn.

I am not my personality. The snail’s shell is not the snail.

Personality is not for improving. It is for dying to, for sloughing off.

I love when I am vulnerable, when my heart is outside of me.