Personality and I

The difference between our personality and our I is a matter of degrees of wholeness. An analogy with inner energies can help illuminate this.

There is a dramatic difference between sensing part of our body and sensing the whole body. If you are not clear on that, then please take the time and effort needed to explore whole-body sensing and see how it is different from partial-body sensing.

There is a dramatic difference between being in contact with your body and being in contact with your body, heart, and mind. Again, if you are not clear on that, then please take the time and effort needed to explore being in, inhabiting your whole body, your heart/emotions, and your mind, simultaneously. See how being in all three parts, in the whole of yourself, is different from being in only one part.

There is a dramatic difference between being in contact with body, heart, and mind, and also being in the boundless consciousness that surrounds and permeates us. If you are not clear on that, then please take the time and effort needed to explore opening to and being in the cognizant stillness, the plenum of awareness behind all the sensory impressions of life, the peace beneath your everyday experience. Being in the whole of yourself sets the stage for that. Be in your whole body, heart, and mind, and then relax into the pure awareness surrounding you.

At each of those stages, we open to a greater wholeness connected with the energies of sensation, feeling, thought, and consciousness. In a similar way, we can look at wholeness through the lens of will. Consider your personality in action. This is pretty much everything that happens in your thoughts, emotions, habits, and attitudes:

That cake looks really good; I think I'll have some … I'm going to see my (brother, cousin, friend, lover, son, mother, doctor, or whomever) tomorrow. When I see them, I'm going to tell them how I really feel about this situation … I've only got ten minutes until I have to leave, I hope I can get this finished by then. There just does not seem to be enough time in the day … This show is boring; I'm going to change the channel … I hope she's OK … This is delicious … I hope they say nice things about me … I don't look so good this morning … What does he think he's doing? … Wow! I feel great …

In that list of examples of the personality's inner voice, please substitute the recurring features of your own personality, this multiplicity of automatic patterns of thought, emotion, and physical habits, this continually changing perspective that judges and comments on your life. This is our I, our will, splintered by our personality to manifest as many I’s.

The initial condition we find ourselves in is that our I is completely yoked to and enmeshed in our me, our personality. Even just to see that this is truly our situation is a major step, requiring that our I, for at least a moment, poke its head above the roiling waters of our personality and notice the mixed bag of characters that populate our inner world. That moment changes everything. We are not one: we are many. The shock of it reveals that there is more to us than we had thought. It opens the possibility of not being subject to the random whims of our personality, the possibility of transcending and integrating our many I's into the wholeness of our real I, our true will.

Prior to this we were lost in our personality; we simply were our personality, with no daylight in between. Our I would flow through our personality and split into a thousand pieces, a thousand thoughts and urges and emotions, like a ray of light passing through a prism. Each small piece of our I then claims center stage and jurisdiction over the whole of us, for a moment, until it is summarily displaced by another piece, under the influence of some other section of our personality, some other pattern. These transitions result from accidental interactions among our thoughts, emotions, memories, and sensory experiences. And the entire amorphous collection is loosely organized by a story of ourselves, an inconsistent story full of contradictions, a story told differently depending on which part of us is telling it.

Our inner work is not about separating I and me in the ordinary sense of separating two similar things, because the I and the me are on different levels. They can, and do, and should coexist. We seek a deeper level of ourselves, where we live from our I rather than from our personality. Except for dangerous and destructive tendencies, we do not need to change our personality. Nor are we aiming to rid ourselves of it. We absolutely need it to make our way through life. And life would be very dull without our likes and dislikes, our habits and tendencies.

Our real I encompasses and transcends our personality in a greater wholeness. The value of this view, besides its validity, is that it mitigates the implication that our I is a point, and thus susceptible to egoism. The greater-whole view replaces that single-point assumption, thereby distinguishing more readily between our I and self-centered egoism. Both I and ego can use our personality as an instrument, as the invaluable repository of skills for dealing with our life. The difference is that our I uses our personality to serve others, while our ego uses it to serve itself.

The greater-whole view of will becomes even more important as we look higher up the ladder of the spirit. That way opens as we become able to transcend our personality, as we become uniquely ourselves and, through that, intimately connected with and equal to everyone else.

For this week, please notice the changing cast of characters that make up your inner life.

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