Our Personalities Are Temporary Self-Identities! A Shutterstock Licensed Image.
Some life lessons are hard to swallow, but the toughest ones are those which push us toward a greater self-understanding. With an expanded sense of Self, we make better decisions and our lives are more peaceful and productive, even healthier. What determines our growth is not warm-fuzzy, white-light vision-boards; rather, it’s the actions we take toward fulfilling our dreams of self-realization that determine our growth and success.
Each of us is an ever-changing chemical equation in pursuit of connection and equanimity. We know that our personal alchemy and happiness are dependent upon our thoughts and desires, but without investment through action, nothing in our physical realities will change.
Working in the background of our daily lives and relationships is a set of powerful personalities. This buoyant, loyal, feisty group of secret identities is what we use to interact with the world. By confronting, healing, and up-leveling each of these personalities, we in turn release emotions, people, events, beliefs, and paradigms that no longer serve our evolution. In the process, we transform this life, as well as prior and future lives.
The Purpose of Personalities
Every experience results in the accumulation of attitudes, intentions, and beliefs, which live in us like magnets. Left unchecked, our internal magnets can attract undesirable experiences to our lives. These magnets also form identity masks (personalities) within us, which also attract experiences and act as the engines behind our actions. We are at the mercy of these amorphous, embedded constructs until we recognize, heal, and release them. While some of our personalities are helpful or benign, the rest of the crew can be a force to reckon with.
Our core personalities act as the collective machine that drives our lives. Much like our spirits use our bodies to live in physical realities, we use our primary personalities to engage the world, make friends, get jobs, and get attention. By temporarily naming and then exploring our personalities, we make them more relatable in the moment, which helps us process unattended emotions, imagery, and experiences. Doing so, we increase our ability to forgive ourselves and others. As a result, our awareness expands and we grow.
Over time, we evolve and our core personality sets change. At the ends of our lives, we drop all personalities and return to Source.
This does not mean that our souls die: it means we go back to an existence without pretense or construct, a state we can achieve while living in our bodies in the here and now.
Return to Source
According to the most ancient spiritual traditions, the purpose of life is to release the features within us that are incongruent with the Source of all life. This is what the masters who have appeared throughout time have taught us. Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Quan Yin, Amma, Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Vivekananda, Osho, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sai Baba and all the light beings who brighten our spirits, point to oneness with creation, a merging with eternity.
They desire for us to go through the process of Self-realization, seeking Nirvana, the state of the perfect non-existence of self-serving desires. Some people pursue this clear state by praying, chanting, or living monastic lives, but the majority of us utilize relational and emotional modalities to serve our spiritual advancement. These tools bring us closer to the Self, expanding our awareness, clarity, and sense of freedom.
By exploring and finding empathy for the broad spectrum of human attributes inherent in the human condition, we move closer to the Source.
By seeing ourselves in every living being we experience and interact with, we become free. With our intentions and actions focused on embracing all aspects of the human condition, we awaken.
The Challenge
How do we begin this type of deep exploration? There are powerful rituals that can bring us closer to ourselves. From Sweat Lodges and Pagan Rituals to advanced energy work and self-cleansing modalities, we have many options.
The challenge is that most of us do not have the simplicity of life to allow a one-time workshop or Vision Quest to take hold in our lives in a longer-term, meaningful way. And even though we might recite positive thoughts and mantras, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know these things are often not powerful enough to break our emotional and psychological bondage. In many ways, traditional new age modalities are temporary, egotistic, problematic, and narcissistic.
We cannot advance without a measure of deep exploration and momentary pain. We might achieve a state of clarity for a moment, but it doesn’t mean we can sustain it or necessarily benefit from it. Even if we sit in meditation for 10 days and eat vegetarian food while focused on our navel, the positive effects will easily wear off if we do not upkeep the efforts. Consistency in positive, transformative, and cleansing action is what returns us to ourselves and keeps us there.
You can breathe white light out your crown chakra all day long, but there’s no guarantee your mind will not consume you in the hours that follow.
Slowing down for long enough to achieve lasting transformation is a challenge we all face. There are few systems in place that can give us true transformation. Most of the spiritual teachings we regularly consume are bundles of candy. They feel so good, they’re pretty, they’re delivered by sexy yogis, they create positive vibrations and they inspire a sense of openness for a moment. But a week later, what has truly changed? Very little.
The path of the Shaman and spiritual aspirant consists of an equal balance of exploring the light and opening the doors to the shadows. This path takes into account the balance of light and dark inherent in the universe. We cannot sit in the light and expect lasting change.
The universe is everything, both light, and dark. If, while consuming the light, we are not dancing with the dark, we are missing the point. Jesus spent 40 days in the desert. He wasn’t playing charades or writing positive thoughts on index cards. He was dealing with his shit and the shit in all of the universes. We all have the same opportunity but rarely pursue it.
The Work
6 years in development, Paul’s The Personality Cards, and Blended Soul app, are tools that can help you deepen your process of self-exploration. If you wish to do the work without a toolset, here’s what I recommend:
- Sit quietly with your journal and write down a list of your positive attributes.
- Write down a list of people who you believe are personifications of these attributes.
- Write down a list of your negative and bizarre attributes.
- Write down a list of the people who are reflections of these attributes.
- Pick the 3 most-exaggerated people from each list.
- One by one, look into each personality and be honest about how you resemble each person. Explore each attribute and look at how you have behaved in similar ways.
- Be honest with yourself about your ugliness. Express regret, find your anger, find the sadness beneath your anger and let it all go.
- Find forgiveness for yourself and others in every instance related to these 6 personalities.
- Contemplate the images that have haunted you or oppressed you. Focus on the emotions and let them out. Release your attached to the images and the emotions. Clear the slate so that you can become new.
- Celebrate your positive attributes and commit to realigning with them in all of your future endeavors.
- Write down your thinking and emotional processes as you go through this activity.
- Allow several hours or several days to complete a thorough exploration and full-body release. Do whatever it takes.
- Once complete, keep a list of the attributes you are hoping to embody throughout the rest of your life.
- Repeat this process when you feel cloudy or uncertain about who you are.
Enjoy Your Clarity
After going through this process, you will have a newfound clarity. Your mind will be more at ease and your heart will be open and full. Go deep and find clarity.
The purpose here is to embody a high level of acceptance for who you really are, who other people are and what reality is. There is no quick path to remove all of our false projections. There is only the expanding of your awareness, which most often comes through an intensely emotional experience. Without emotion, there is little chance wisdom will prevail.
Seek to know all parts of you. Do not run away from the shadows and challenges deep within your psyche. Cleanse them by opening the doors to the light. While the pain might feel unbearable, it is temporary.
This is an ongoing process. Continue to explore and release emotions around the imagery you obsess about. Grieve every image and every personality. Always seek the release of negative attributes and allow for the deepest awareness around every situation.
The Potential Changes
The more you are able to cleanse the emotions from your physical body and the more you are able to shed light on your shadows, the more you will evolve. This evolution will create greater simplicity in your life. It will be a letting go on every level. The value is that by climbing all of these emotional mountains, you give yourself the ability to climb every mountain and face every obstacle in your physical reality.
The more you go through these processes, the more you will see changes in your jobs, security, love life, personal life, and relationships. Upon every letting go of emotion, you’ll release or change your magnets. With fewer magnets, there are fewer attachments.
By going through these types of processes, you will change at a core level. This means that some of the people in your life may leave, new people may emerge and life will feel different. The degree to which you commit to this process will be equal to the level of peace that will emerge in your life.
Throughout this process, you will learn whether or not your family is an age-old addiction or a valuable tribe of compatriots. You will learn about your inner monsters and their ill-effects in your life. Most importantly, you will learn how to be connected to the Source of all life. While this takes time, each step can be freeing, illuminating, and exciting.
Born From a Divine Spark
We are all born from divine sparks. These sparks, however pure, cannot prevent us from adopting debilitating characteristics and attitudes. However difficult, healing these aspects helps us evolve.
You are invited to explore, embrace, forgive, and celebrate all aspects within yourself and others. Imagine the personalities living in your core. See each of them as a reflection of you and the people in your life. See each one as a representation of an aspect of the universe calling you to love, heal, and master it. May this process help you move successfully past your stories and closer to emotional and spiritual freedom.
