Why am I describing one of the most popular shows ever as “hidden”? People love and adore the show but how many can really pinpoint what exactly do they like about it? They like Aang but what makes Aang likeble or what makes the Ba Sing Se episodes so memorable? Many fans watched the series as kids when their minds were still relatively pure and more “silent” which allowed the show’s message to reach and touch their hearts. Few years later came “Legend of Korra” which continued the story while using the same formula with slighly more matured themes and yet a lot of people didn’t like it. Why is that? The upper mentioned kids became adults. The brain got involved and what is the number 1 enemy of the brain – not knowing how something works. Usually with the increasing reliance on our thoughts comes a decreasing faith in everything else. If we love something than the brain(# the Ego) needs to understand why! Without the required life experience and with the Western filter being “On”, its pretty difficult to spot and understand many of the Last Airbender messages. The mind is unable to “trace” your love towards Aang to his growt by overcoming fear, change and shame or to his connection with the world by not dividing people/nations when everyone around him did it. All that is lost and the only think that the mind can deliver as an answer .. you “simply” like Aang. The unknown but full love that kids felt was replaced with a nostalgic love, a memory that the mind connected to Aang and the series. When Korra came out, people didn’t care to notice that all those foundations that made the Last Airbender were still there. The only think that mattered was that Aang wasn’t. Its perfectly alright not to “like” a show for your personal reasons but to me its kind of ironic people claiming that Aang was better, stronger, smarter than Korra when his whole story ark was centered around not to view the world in such manner. There is even a hour and half video on You Tube named “The legend of Korra is garbage and here’s why” which is viewed 5 mln times.
Tag: Inner peace
The frames of our consciousness
What do you see on the picture above? A “black dot”, will be the most common answer. Immediately our brain informs us that the “black” is something of notice, an object of interest that is worth pointing out. However did you spot the “white” that surrounds the dot? Likely your brain labelled it as “nothing”, an empty field. It was trained to do so. Can there be a black dot without the white field that surrounds it? Now that I have pointed it out, you probably consciously rose above the fixed thinking and saw the obvious – the “wholeness” of the picture was cut in half by your mind. This is something necessary for us not to overload and go crazy BUT we should be consciously aware of this “cropping” technique. We should keep it in check, provide it with a healthy doubt and ensure that the limit of our horizon never remains the same. Life’s complexity is beyond us BUT our brains will never admit it. Knowledge is their only fuel. They will cut the World as much as possible, put it in frames and stubbornly claim “this is Life”. Is it though?
The false perception of “being confident”
What does “confidence” actually mean? Have you ever tracked it back to its roots? Most of us, never bother. We inherit its understanding from our surroundings a.k.a Western Society. Its inprinted inside us since an early age and the “feel” about it seems extremely natural to us to ever doubt it. We question its meaning, with the same likeness that we ask ourselfs “Why do I have two hands and not three?”.
For most people, confidence equals “feeling good”. Nothing wrong with that. But when we crushed it to smaller pieces, it becomes “to have some kind of an advantage over the rest, to be better than them”. We want to be more – beautiful, successful, fit, smarter, to have the best swag and so on, it could be anything. Once we choose, the mather becomes the center of our life. Its the very first thing we want for other people to see in us and the thing that we are most secure to be judged on. Let say someone choose “beauty”. His subconscious starts to compare him to other people. There are always areas that he would “lack” compared to the rest. Hypothetically those are the ones that lower his overal ranking which translates into those are the ones that stops him from “feeling good”. The mind begins to view them as “flaws”, they became his ill places. He co-exist with them as “something that he has to live with” but never accepts, often feeling shame. Once we putt too much weight on our “flaws” we become self-critical. The next and bigger scale, letting it “outside” – we see our flaws/fears in other people and we begin to critic them as well. All of this is subconscious, we do it while not understanding the process and our motivation behind it. We accept the idea that this is us. The real person steps back so that the “image”, created by the mind, could take over.
How could we escape the illusion named “confidence” and avoid being trapped inside it. If you read this, you already did – the hardest part is to know that it exist. Now you would begin to spot it with an increasing rate. Fight it but not with anger. Give it time and dont be hard on yourself, that slows the process. In the meantime, I could offer you a new take about “being confident” – be confident because you exist. Its a simple anchor but the most real one. If you accept it and eliminated the endless race with others, inner peace would come naturaly.
Bukmeikara 