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What Are Masks?
Today we are discussing masks. What are masks? A disguise of our identity. I must admit, the first mask that springs to mind now is this “V” for vendetta one. That’s a pretty meaningful one right now, and will likely become more so. A different face. A way to hide or change face. They can…
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Sources of Masks
Masks were not created by us. Our oldest traditions as human beings involved masks of some kind. We only arrive at the understanding we have of animals and nature by adopting a persona that matches what we are looking at, at least to the best of our ability. I like those African voodoo masks. They…
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Formless World
To close the gap between masks and identity, there is another tool of the shaman called a fetish. Cultures the world over have used fetishes of one type or another, and I don’t mean a subject of obsessive thought. I mean an object that is believed to be possessed, not by the shaman but by…
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Forms People Take
What sort of forms do people take? Authority. The king or god. Status. Lover. How much wisdom do these forms have? How much guidance do they provide? A lineage back throughout time. Indeed. As they say, those who don’t remember their past are doomed to repeat it. When you take on that form, it takes…
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Second Life Forms: Death and Wolf
Let’s use our Second Life forms right now, shall we? You might be surprised about how much of the form is real in you, how much of it you know. I will go first, ready? Speaking as this form, I am dead. Everything will be dead, everything is making progress toward death, and no one…
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Second Life Forms: Fairy, Ghost and Clown
Tell us about life as a fairy. My first thought is that my first Halloween costume as a child was the blue fairy. Did you ever stop being the blue fairy? Not sure, but this costume is winter colors and I just had a birthday. So I was thinking of cycles, but yeah, I flit…
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Masks Pick You
Remember the two kingdoms of masks I spoke of earlier? Nature and death. Also, mind and body. Any words will be a bit strained, but we all have the experience, because we all have the same collection of masks. What are the truly great stories? What do they include? A bad guy. Yes. They always have…
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Mask of True Power
Imagine with me if you will. You are sick in bed. Your bed has been moved to the center of a large room by your family, and they are very afraid for your well-being. You can barely see and the heat is terrible. You can’t rest even when you faint from exhaustion. In this large…
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Choose from the Web
Crow is a liberator, a herald of change. After crow comes the great serpent, also known as the dragon. I’ve had a serpent coil round my body, and I could feel it squeezing the breath out of me. Yes, again a warning, an effort to encourage you to act. The serpent coils around the tree of life. You…
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Adopting Traits
I will start with a question. How much of what you know yourself as is something you chose to be? How many skills did you freely choose to learn? I’ve noticed that who I am is a result of my choices, but I didn’t completely know what the choices were doing to me when they…
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Natural vs Expected
They say that crime occurs when inclination meets up with opportunity. Is there any set of values that can be clearly established to have no dark side? Would I rob a bank if someone gave me a mask and a gun and drove me to the door of one? I would say that you are…
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World’s Biggest Monster
Was Picasso “wrong” to put cows’ heads on women? Or was that Chagall? Some would swear emphatically that he was, would even accuse him of misogyny. I don’t think the cows forgave him, actually. Cows are very tolerant beings, excellent examples of ahimsa if not perfect examples. So let’s look at that just for a…
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Acquired Persona
In the relationship between the natural self and the acquired persona, does the learned or trained take up as much of our awareness as the self-motivated? Less? More? More because it’s practised. Engrained? Habituated? How much of what you perceive yourself to be is something that came naturally? How much of what you perceive others…
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Colour Your Own View of the World
How do we use the elements our society gives us in a better way? Tolerate them. That would be a good start, yes, short of threat to life, limb, sustenance or sanity. Be open to different elements and changing elements. Treat them as suggestions? It would better serve to actively engage them. You can’t arbitrarily…
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Selection is Needed
Every colour is good. Indeed, they are all good, but what if you run one colour into another? They blend. Some blend better than others. If everything runs together, it’s all brown. Some selection is needed. How many people these days live with a brown picture of life? All looks like dookie? A lot but they call it…
Category: Masks
You have no reality beyond your masks. In every situation, in every environment, you adapt or adopt a persona which is just another word for mask. We acquire our masks from two different sources. The masks like you see in voodoo are inspired by human observation of nature. The other set of masks is derived from the relatively new domain of human “conscious’ thought. Very primitive and impressionistic masks all wind up resembling death masks.
Let’s remove all masks from everything. What would life be like? It would be a formless world. The original meaning of the word soul in Greek was a reference to form, otherwise you have formless matter. All forms take on you. Everyone is possessed. This is the substance of our being.
“Although I know it’s unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.” Stephen Dunn
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Oscar Wilde