Sublime

After the 1950s, personal identity became increasingly disengaged from beliefs about character and basic human nature and was associated instead with consciousness - that is to say, with something a good deal more shifting and elusive.

When you are responding ineffectively to things the other person is saying and doing, that person owns the frame, and you are being frame-controlled.

Ultimately when the chips are down, each of us performs in the moment, or we don’t. Being aware of that moment of choice results from presence.

Because unlike so much else upon which we might like to have some sort of impact, the canvas of the self is compact and near enough that it feels like we might actually pull off some measure of control. Even though, as I have discovered, this, too, is a grand illusion.

I’ve found that introducing a little mindfulness where previously there had been none can be insidiously irrevocable.

In the process, we lose sight of a fundamental truth: we have gradually all become neo-liberal, in both thought and deed.

We internalize the message of what Byung-Chul Han has called the “achievement society” where the primary goal of a life is to constantly improve, nudged to become “entrepreneurs of [our]selves.”⁠1 But constantly trying to be “better” can push us toward goals that are not ours, robbing us of our connection to ourselves.