The False Personality

The False Personality

We Might as Well Wear Masks 🙂

Our goal is to understand our essential nature – those higher aspects of personality that make for a better human being and a better world. Most of us are aware of moments of great happiness and joy, but these states seem to come and go without warning. Instead, we are mostly conscious of our own suffering and the suffering of others. When I speak about suffering, I am not just referring to illness, old age, pain, sorrow, misery, separation from loved ones, emotional hurt and other things that we ordinarily think of suffering. I am also talking about suffering in the sense of not getting what we want or getting what we don’t want. Furthermore, I don’t want to forget the suffering that arises out of the passing away of happiness and joy to less intense states.

Whether it is joy or suffering, our moods seems to change without notice. We seem to be caught in a never-ending struggle to keep our heads above water and keep the bill collectors away from the front door.

I see the development of essence as the path out of this world of suffering. To get there, we have to start somewhere, and the place we have to start is what we might call our “false personality”. What I mean by “false” is that we have learned to suppress our inherent essential nature in order to survive in our families, neighborhoods and society. Exhibition of essential qualities resulted in leaving us vulnerable to attack, which inevitably came. We learned to adopt personality aspects in order to protect ourselves from the outside world. [Read More…]

How do we go from the false personality to essence? How do we let go out our essential qualities without fear?

Of course, meditation is such a tool, as we have seen in hundreds of previous articles on this site.

Now, for the next month or so, we are going to look into the false personality using the enneagram. The enneagram is a 9-sided diagram that can be used to describe aspects not only of our personality, but also of our essence.

Note: The text of this document and the others in this series were written down in 1994, shortly after completing the certified training under Helen Palmer. This is the first time they have been released to the public.

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