How your personality came into being (1)

In this first part you will find how your personality cam into being, in the second part this is illustrated with some examples.

Your personality is everything that you have taught yourself. At first there was just a kind of universal state of being. And then you started to learn to entertain the idea of limitation. For example: nice, allowed, wanted, wrong etc. Every limitation that you have taught yourself that way (being stimulated by your surroundings or not), lead to a further limitation of your experience of your original state of awareness. And now you almost only experience the sum of all the rules, standards, values and other limitations that you have put on the things that come to your awareness. And this result you have learned to call "you" and "world vision". Because that part of your mind stems from the same source as your inner Self, it immediately has created an existence that cannot be undone by your inner Self, as it is as powerful, and therefore has the power to experience itself as separated.

Your personality now will start to create a thought system that will mirror this idea of limitation, and uses for that anything but the characteristics of your inner Self (like oneness, peace, love). But it cannot fully deny its true nature. When you are a human being, you cannot become an elephant. Same applies for a personality: you can entertain the thought system of limitation, but that does not make it a truth in itself, and you will somehow know that.

Your personality puts his efforts into creating limitation and all things that you are not, but it is not supported by anything within you. So to make this more believable to you, your personality has to come up with an ingenious, self-supporting system containing values, standards, ideas, feelings etc. that repeats itself in a vicious circle.

Sooner or later you will start to notice that this is a bit of a weird situation here, that you simply cannot make work in an acceptable way. You do not really feel at home here within the mindset your personality created. That is no failure, it is simply impossible because it is not true in itself, it is make believe by your personality. He knows that, and a lot of his efforts are directed towards hiding that. As far as he is concerned you are allowed to question anything in the world you perceive, but NOT the basis, your personality itself, and suggest that maybe he is the source of it all

Lucky for him, almost nobody seems to doubt all this, so it must be you. There obviously is something very wrong with you. Your personality will now use all kinds of things in the world he created to express this basic-guilt-feeling. One person will hide this feeling by eating, the other suppresses it by drinking, medicine or drugs. Another one tries to live by the rules as much as possible in order to avoid unpleasantness. The next one fills his day with an endless amount of activities, thus eliminating any possibility to become really aware of these feelings. There are people who surround themselves with others in order to diminish this intense feeling of being alone. Other ones follow courses, take therapy, etc. You just go with the flow and make the best of it, because that seems to be the right thing to do. Or you can withdraw yourself from as much as possible, so that you can make up a world that does meet your expectations in your mind.

Source? Guilt. Guilt over having separated yourself from your Self in the first place, and now not being able to make up a world in which you feel comfortable. And the world of your personality has plenty of ways to displace that feeling, but it also comes with all kinds of ways to deal with it. Only somehow none of these solutions brings you what you really want, which repeats the cycle of feeling guilty, only now based on a new input.

This asks for more and more effort to maintain the thought patterns of your personality. The solution is very simple: diminish the amount of energy you put into it, until there is only so little left that you can use the full capacity of your mind for your inner Self only.

That does not mean that your inner Self had left you, it remains there always, only the chatter and activities of your personality made it very difficult for you to remember. And your inner Self is in no way familiar with your personality, you must have understood that by now. So you may not know what to look for in the beginning, because it has become "unfamiliar" and it cannot be found through the ways your personality uses. Let yourself be inspired through other columns on this site to work on that.

It is quite difficult to make a start with this. Because in the beginning your personality is strong, and the remembrance of your inner Self little. Your inner Self is peaceful, quiet, absence of controlled activity, and that is what your personality has labeled as "' dangerous", because he knows in that lies the beginning of the end of himself. So it demands a lot of trust to start with applying these ideas. But every step you take brings you one step closer.

Also take a look at the column an essential step along the way.