The Personality and "My Life"

 All too often our personality is nothing more than psychological clothing that we wear to hide our true self [Self]from the world. 

Teal Swan https://kidadl.com/quotes/top-personality-quotes-to-unleash-your-true-self

I spent hours, off and on, yesterday on a big long post related to what I learned that morning in my "listening" practice and in my meditation practice related to a real-life experience I had on Monday but I struggled to put the message out in the way that felt "wholesome and skillful". There are still so many tangled knots in me that truth sometimes gets caught up in on its way out...snagged...you know...so it comes out thready and a bit tangled itself.  I know that when I struggle over an entry...say if it takes more than an hour...if it just doesn't come..."poof"...out, that ego is still lurking around wanting a say. "There is ego slipping in through the back door trying to have its say", I may say to myself at those times.  Other times, I don't recognize that once again I slipped and am allowing ego to come in to take control of my household. My message gets convoluted.  I post it because that is what I do here...but when I recognize the ego nature of it,  I will take it down for either revision or sleepy time. I do my best to remove the ego contribution.  So I will go back to that entry because it is really important and wants to be expressed....I will determine  where "my personality" and "my life" got in the way of the truth wanting to be expressed and revise it with as little ego as possible.  

Hmm! So today I will probably take some of yesterday's learning and today's learning and whip up an entry on "ego" and on this idea of "my life". 

This morning  I listened to Eckhart Tolle in How to Release Yourself From the Grip of Personality. He spoke about how we get mixed up in our understanding of things because we are very attached to these notions of "my personality" and "my life".  When you read, if you read lol, about the little experience I had with my ego on Monday in a social situation...you will see how caught up I was and still am in "my life" and how "my personality" appears to others. These notions very much dominated my communication and my relating.  Ego went in bruised and somewhat broken in some mind- made comparison scale and once or twice attempted to redeem itself by displaying itself as someone who had "knowledge" or was somehow more because I had such suffering and challenge  in my life etc.

The ego strives incessantly for some type of superiority.

Truth is my ego and my personality are dissolving as part of my own transformation. Without it, I feel oh so naked, especially around others who still view me by my personality. I assume my friends have  an idea of me and who and what I am bsed on our shared working past. I don't want to disapoint because I fear that I will belong less than I do now and I do want to belong.  I always wanted to belong. (The process of awakening and dismantling our shells, I am discovering, leaves one feeling very, very vulnerable) . Though I am in the process of stepping away from ego, that doesn't mean my big fat, reactive ego is gone.  No, not at all. It will step in through the back door again and again especially in social situations. It stepped in Monday. Before I went to brunch, ego was telling me I no longer met a certain standard of acceptability, if I ever did.  I didn't belong and in order to belong I had to be a certain way. If I couldn't compare on the material , belonging to a group, postivity level than I would somehow be superior on how I handle  suffering and having "less than" level.  Bizarre, because I don't feel like I am handling the suffering and the having less than very well at all lol . I realize that my sharing of some of the negative experiences was to redeem "me" from my "notion" of being a pesonality that no longer belonged. I unconsciously sought to  redeem and strengthen this idea , and it is only an idea, of me as the  "brave sufferer" in the group. Yes, Life was offering me plenty pf challenges throughout the years  and I did suffer but ego used those challenges as a rationale for why I didn't belong as a personality...too much suffering! Infact, I realize  this was the screen through which I related to these individuals for years.  Whenever I felt vulnerable, at the point of nolonger belonging, I would amplify my personality as the sufferer and my life as one of suffering. That is what fed my ego and kept me imprisoned in my personality. Yuck! 

Personality

What is the personality, anyway? Tolle describes personality as the subtotal of mental and emotional conditioning. He explains that we often describe ourselves by referring to the opinions of us expressed by others over the years, our past, our memories, by the roles we play in society, what we do, what we have accomplished, what we believe, and how we think and feel. He also explains how limiting this is, how when we define like this we confine like this. We can actually imprison ourselves in our own personalities. This idea of the personality of "me" is just a concept!  Just an idea.  When we explain ourselves as distinct, separate "little me's"  we are deriving a sense of who we are from a conceptual mind-made self.  It is just an idea that we support, cling to, and defend.  We need to get that, right? It is just a mental concept in our heads...it is not the experiential reality of who we are. The personality is merely the "surface you". You are much deeper than that. 

"My Life"

What is this idea of "my life" then? He goes on to say that the idea of "my life" is our story.  It is the predominant narration in my mind, that through which I interpret everything I come in contact with...the screen through which I interpret other people, events, places, and things. 

Notions, Not Reality

We are often so attached to these notions and they are just that: notions.  In truth who we are, is so far beyond the personality and its confining nature.  There is no "my life"...there is just Life being breathed through all of us and happening all around us as it has been for billions and billions of years.  Yet these ego-minds cling to the "my" in us as expressions of that Life, as if somehow we are the center all these ancient complicated forces circling around. Man...we are not "It"...we are just an expression of "It" and we get this miraculous opportunity to observe it and experience it.  We get to be a part of all this! The reality of who we are is pretty cool actually...but so many of us are snagged on those tangled knots of ego and are so lost in the screen we cannot see what is behind it. We are so lost in our heads, building and protecting ideas of self, that we do not "experience" Life as the Self. The screen gets in the way of us seeing the world, others, and life circumstances in a clearer view and it prevents us, if we are so lost in those notions of "my personality" and "my life", of seeing who we really are beneath it.  

Sure we have roles here and that is okay and normal to our experience.  We just have to come to see, according to Eckhart Tolle, that those roles are merely our functions for serving Self and humanity, the world, Life.  They are not who we are. 

In the Way

You know, the "you" and the "me" is often in the way of our experience of Life, clouding it, confining it, diminishing it etc. Deepak Chopra explains that gratitude is one of the most effective ways of  getting ego out of the way and getting in touch with the soul.  If we could only learn to see the whole picture beyond our puny ideas of self, if only we could recognize everything we experience s a gift. Life would then be a very sweet experience. 

I love this mindful approach to understanding our personalities: 

By recognizing our patterns and those of others, we begin to understand them all as being impersonal, simply as the playing out of our habitual [and conditioned] tendencies, rather than as the expression of some reified sense of self. They become less of an unconscious prison and more of a playground of transformation.

Joseph Goldstein,  page 237.

All is well! 

Deepak Chopra (.n.d.) 21 Day Meditation Challenge for Abundance. Spotify

Eckhart Tolle (June 28, 2022 ) Release yourself from the Grip of Personality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnQTridVaTM

Joseph Goldstein (2016) Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening. Boulder: Sounds True