Personality

I asked a friend to offer me some direction because she spoke to me during this writing session. I asked for a topic of discussion or question that I could attempt to answer and she said “Personality”. 

So personality, what is it? I can not say objectively what one thing is or isn’t, I can only make observations about what Mike has thought about it and what has been observed in other people’s thoughts or understanding about it. 

Personality as it tends to be defined from this perspective is a unique expression of an individual. That which demonstrates in some ways what the person feels or believes or thinks. It is typically understood as something that is generally consistent, sure personalities tend to change throughout lifetimes, but if a person acted in a certain way once and never again you wouldn’t say that that is a representation of their personality, but actually a deviance from it. One might say that a personality is a series of habits of action or thought that a given individual expresses somewhat consistently. The lines that determine when a habit becomes personality are of course arbitrary and subjective, but one can still recognize patterns. 

It seems to me that the level at which one’s behaviours could be described as an expression of personality is directly linked to one’s level at which one understands themselves as separate beings from others. For example, you might say that an ant has very little personality in comparison to a human. The ant simply acts out the functions that it fundamentally knows to be necessary for its and its entire colony’s survival. It is almost automatic in that sense, it has very little or no individual interest. Whereas a human might prioritize itself over others in almost every decision or behaviour. 

I have made this connection a few times in my mind now but haven’t fully thought it through so I will put it here and analyze it. The personality is akin to the ego. As I said, this was a response of my thinking mind, I have yet to determine if this is an accurate comparison. 

So. Is the personality simply the ego? What, if any, would we say are the differences? And while we’re at it, what exactly is the ego? 

I’m getting that the personality is the expression of the ego in terms of actions or behaviours. Typically we wouldn’t say that one’s habitual thoughts are an aspect of personality, but what one expresses as a consequence of those thoughts. 

The personality is a collection of tendencies that one expresses which are a result of one’s held beliefs, or one’s emotional patterns that have been conditioned into the individual. The ego, you might say are the beliefs themselves. For example, growing up I believed that I should have been afforded respect, I believed that I deserved it because to me I acted in a way that showed it. So this belief I had that people should respect me caused me to become angry, sad, or disappointed when I wasn’t given any. Sometimes this caused me to become indignant and lash out at those who disrespected me. Sometimes it caused me to go internal and become self deprecating, making myself believe that although there were aspects of myself that deserved respect there must be something fundamentally wrong with me that I could not see or could not control, causing intense depression and having me act in a way that was apathetic or poignant. These behaviours you could say were aspects of my personality, the belief that I deserved respect was an aspect of my ego. 

When I write about the personality being a consequence of one’s held beliefs I have the thought in my mind that I am referring to false beliefs, because when all is known, belief is not necessary, there is difference between belief and understanding. I don’t believe that my eyes open and close, I simply understand that they do. So I want to bring attention to the idea that even after one lets go of whatever false beliefs they were holding they can still have understanding that would create a specific personality. The experiences that we have in our lives do create beliefs, but they also just create patterns of harmonic tendencies. When all is known it is seen that fear is not necessary so one would no longer give any energy to worry or apprehension. Which would in turn take away energy from behaviours that were once part of a personality but no longer serve the individual. For example, someone who experienced many moments of despair and found that by adopting a sense of humour about their situation were able to alleviate some of, if not all of the negative feeling that came from it, might then develop the habit of making jokes and causing laughter whenever an uncomfortable situations arises. This would then be described as an aspect of their personality. At first this habit may have been formed out of fear. This person recognized that when they felt negative emotion they also felt fear and had a desire to escape it. By making light of the situation they were able to transcend the fear in a way and concomitantly the negative emotion. This offered relief and the individual then automatically repeats this behaviour because they are averse to feeling negative emotions again. This is very typical of the comedian type personality, they deal with great sorrow from the seemingly horrible truths that they recognize about life itself. So to deal with those feelings they choose to laugh and influence others to laugh as well, at least then they could sense the relief of the energy leaving their body through laughter rather than it stagnating in to anger and resentment or fear. 

But when one recognizes this pattern in oneself and that it was encouraged in order to avoid feeling sadness or anger then they have the ability to overcome it and understand its origin rendering it obsolete as a habit. Meaning that it is no longer necessary to alleviate their own suffering, but now that this skill had been practiced and somewhat perfected for so long, one can still use it to help others to laugh through their pain to lift the festering energy from the being and as a result, raising the consciousness to a level where sorrow, pain, or suffering can be seen as part of the whole which is necessary to understand in order to transcend and feel and know the emotions of positivity and harmony. Also, if and when they encounter energy of fear or negative emotions again themselves they can use that laughter as a tool. So in this case, this aspect of personality is no longer habitual in the sense that it is unconscious, it is known why it exists and chooses to use it when it feels it is necessary.