Building Of The Structure Of Personality

For the majority of humankind, the structure of personality exists from the moment we are conceived, and at its basic level is inherited from our genes and is influenced by our soul energy. This structure is in place because of the genetic instructions we inherited responsible for organization of the brain. During conception and from birth onward, additional layers are added to the structure of personality, which happen through imprinting and include mental, emotional and physical aspects of the personality. These develop as we grow into our full stature. Each layer is built on top of the previous layer.

Imprinting – How Layers Are Added To The Personality

We exist in a changing world. As such, we are changing and evolving life forms. Imprinting allows us to build on our history and pass this along through our genes. Imprinting goes on collecting our energy in the existing life form, building it over each generation. As far as human history is considered, the imprinting going on is primarily building more energy in the structure of the mind that we are familiar with as personality. Imprinting is occurring each day from encounters we have with other forms of energy around us. All forms are made of mass and energy and it is well known from Einstein’s equation of E=MC², that energy is equal to the mass times the speed of light squared. From this equation, we know that energy and mass are interchangeable, and that we are vibrating objects of energy. From Newton’s law of motion we know that when objects encounter each other they affect each other, according to the object’s force, velocity and mass.

Imprinting can happen on different energetic levels in us, which include mental, emotional and physical aspects. In short, we are affected each day by that which we encounter, and we keep accumulating experiences and over time modify our response pattern to encountered events. This process is expanding our memory banks and building more complicated response patterns stored in the brain and body. It takes energy to store and maintain this information.

Anytime we encounter a certain event there is an energetic character and we detect all kinds of information about it, which comes from our experience. In the blink of an eye we search our vast memory banks, and we know if this event is unknown or familiar, agreeable or disagreeable, weaker than our energy or stronger than our energy, to name a few. We will respond to it according to how we have read the situation with the underlying motive to survive or gain an advantage.

If we are not afraid, then we are open to the energy that we encounter, are getting harmonious with that energetic vibration, and can be said to be in communication with it. This is the ideal state, which can lead to adaptation and change to existing response systems, where we can learn something new and modify our old way of responding. If we fear the energy can overpower or destroy us, we will run away from it to protect our existing structure. In running away, we preserve the existing system and rarely learn something new. Protecting ourselves is an important option and way to conserve our energy for a time when we are ready to face something stronger. Lastly, if we feel the other energy is dangerous and we feel strong enough to take it on, then we will confront or destroy it, to protect others or ourselves. This is another case where we act to preserve the existing system and rarely learn anything new. The existing thing we are protecting can be a physical form, our point of view or a habit. We will continue to add new strategies in each situation we encounter, to survive and keep ourselves intact. If we flee, we find a new way to flee, or if we fight, we find a new way to fight, or we could be adapting to the energy as a means to make ourselves invisible. Adaptation is another survival strategy, not the true stance of wanting to change our conditioned response pattern. To change something in an essential way requires a new creative response. Creativity comes from our source, not from our programmed responses.

All our encounters affect us in numerous ways and on many levels. Over time, our personality keeps getting more complicated and energetically ‘heavier’. The unformed pool of energy that was our source energy was first used to grow us into our full stature and later is used to build and store complex survival mechanisms in the brain and body.

Layers Of Personality According To Age

The gestation period is nine months, and it is interesting that if you double that nine months successive times, you arrive at a template, which shows the layers of personality and stages of growth of the human being as seven stages.

Conception to Birth, 9 months, Core Inherited Layer

1. 0 - 18 months, 1.5 Years, Baby, Emotional Layer
2. 18 – 36 months, 1.5 - 3 Years, Toddler, Cognitive Layer
3. 36 – 72 months, 3- 6 Years, Child, Survival Strategy Layer
4. 72 – 144 months, 6-12 Years, Preteen, Validation of Personality
5. 144 – 288 months, 12-24 Years, Teenager, Differentiation of Personality
6. 288 – 576 months, 24-48 Years, Reproduction years, Expansion of Personality
7. 576 – 1152 months, 48-96 Years, Awakening, Transformation, Death

This insight came when I asked ‘the cosmos’ how long the kundalini transformation would take. I was amazed to see the growth stages so clearly. I do not think everyone follows this roadmap exactly; they are average ages for the various stages. I feel the awakening timeframe would depend on what you have achieved in past lives, and your current soul vibration level. These days increasing numbers of youth are spiritually awakening in the fifth stage in the early twenties. I presume they are aware enough to understand they can skip the personality expansion stage and immediately start meditation to dissolve the layers that have built-up. The baby boomers on average seem to have spiritual awakened around age thirty-five and the kundalini awakening on average occurs in the later part of the sixth stage, when hormones are changing and when men and women enter the menopause years. This makes sense because when reproduction slows down in the body it creates an energy surge. Reproduction is no longer the focus. The new focus becomes self-realization and the body boosts the energy by shutting down unneeded function to make that event more likely. The majority of kundalini awakening cases I have heard about all have onset in the sixth stage. The table shows the possibility to regenerate ourselves by dissolving our personality, rather than only having the option to succumb to gravity, conditioning and degeneration and ending with death.

Finally, I think this table is interesting because there are seven physical stages from birth to death, which has many parallels. It is a cosmic number representing the seven notes of the scale, the seven colors, the seven chakras of the body and the seven days that God created the world in the Christian story of creation, to name a few. From intuition, this table tells me that it will take one year of dedicated work to heal each layer of the personality in the kundalini transformation. At the time of this writing, I am in my sixth year, and feel I am on target to complete the transformation this year, which would be in December of 2012. I am not attached to any specific date but I am excited about completing the transformation.

Core Inherited Layer (Soul Energy To Birth)

The core aspects of personality are part of us the moment we are conceived. The genes we inherit determine the basic shape and operation of our brain, as well our body organization. However, even the genes inherited from our parents are not the final determination of what we become. The recently discovered epigenome is an energetic layer that affects the genome and can turn certain DNA switches off and on. The DNA is like the hardware and the epigenome is the software, where the programming and instructions happen and determine what is expressed through the DNA. I suspect this energetic layer is heavily influenced by our soul energy, which is intrinsically part of the growing human. I think our soul energy can influence our inherited genes, affecting what switches are turned off and on. Many spiritual people believe we choose our parents, selecting them for the correct environment and background that will help us learn our next life lesson.

Energetic influences can be inherited from our ancestors. For example, there was a study of a family over many years, whose ancestors had experienced strong drought. Scientists could determine that this emotional disturbance and ‘fear of drought’ was passed on to children through the gene pool. Finally, there is the subject of past life influences and our soul energy that occupies our body. These subjects are beyond the scope of this book but I feel it is good to mention them for completion.

Emotional Survival Strategy: Love & Self-Survival (0-1.5 Years)

During the conception period, in the birth process, and to about age one and a half years, the emotional layer is built in the personality. I call it an emotional layer, because before the cognitive facilities of the brain are developed, we primarily interact with the world through feelings. For the baby, it is all about getting love and not getting hurt. The baby is vulnerable to outside influences, needs protection, and a primary concern is survival. The most important learning experiences during this period are about surviving, and thus the first survival strategy of the personality is learned at the level of feelings. This layer is primarily built because there is a lack of unconditional love. If we had an abundance of unconditional love, we would be nurtured and protected and would have no reason to protect ourselves. The world is not like that, so we build a strategy to get love and to protect ourselves.

Psychological research has determined there are nine basic types of survival strategies according to how we respond to events through our emotional response system. These strategies have been well documented and are in the body of knowledge known as the enneagram. Energetically, we can react to any event in three basic ways. We can try to overpower the energy by fighting against it, or we can escape the energy by fleeing from it, and last we can integrate with the energy by adapting to it. When you take all permutations of the three possibilities of flee, fight, adapt, you get the nine basic enneagram types. Each personality has a dominant passion (use of emotional energy) that corresponds to the nine basic types. These passions determine the enneagram core type. Anger, pride, deceit, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust and sloth are the passions. Besides the core enneagram type, each person uses two other enneagram types. One type is used when we feel stressed and the other type is used when we feel secure. These are the positive and negative sides of the personality, known as masculine (protective) and feminine (nurturing) attributes, or the left and right face. All our responses are done to ensure our survival and validate the personality. Determining our enneagram type is helpful to see our passion in action when it arises, so we can heal this layer.

When we grew as a baby, many experiences had a huge emotional impact on us when they happened. We may have a vague memory or heard stories about certain experiences we had, but today they seem insignificant. During these early years, a survival strategy is developed with patterns of emotional response to life events. This survival strategy is the deepest core layer of our personality, besides inherited aspects. Because it is the deepest layer, it affects all our responses to life and is invisible to most of us. This childish emotional response pattern, because it was not learned cognitively is difficult to detect in operation. This layer is also called the ‘inner child’. After this layer is healed, we stop walking in circles by repeating the same overall response pattern, and we stop behaving like a child when we do not get our way. This layer cannot be healed until the outer layers are healed, because healing happens in reverse order of the construction of the personality. Healing of the personality is like taking a backward walk through time.

The walking around in circles that affects every decision we make in life, is essentially about finding love and security in the outside world. What we do not know is that this love will never be found in the outside world. When we turn our eyes inward and look for the love within, then we will be near to healing the first layer we built around our core, which contains the kernel of love we seek.

Cognitive Survival Strategy: Validation, Social Layer (1.5 - 12 Years)

As the brain develops, there is a preference to process information by thinking about it versus feeling about it. Now, the building of the cognitive survival strategy starts. This layer is built on top of the emotional survival strategy. We construct complex scenarios on how to respond according to the emotional charge we get as reactions to our encounters. We have already decided on our preferred way to respond emotionally to events (one of the nine enneagram types), which does not change over the lifetime of building the remaining layers of our personality.

This phase is about refining how to get validation from the outside world, for that which we want our personality to be. We are developing a complex upside and downside response pattern that involves thinking about the event, then choosing how to respond to it. Our underlying motive with this behavior is to survive, but it is not physical survival, it is about the survival of the entity of personality that we are building in our mind. Here we will discover, develop and refine our best way to respond to events when we like them and when we do not like them, using our choice and ability to react back to the world with our growing physical, emotional and mental capacities.

Adult Individualization, End Of Growing, Relationships (12 – 24 Years)

In these years, we are focused on differentiating ourselves from others and are busy accumulating attributes for our personality. Sexual maturation occurs in this period and creates another layer of identity depending on our sexual attributes and experiences we have. These attributes include many things depending on what we value for ourselves or how we get our validation from the outside world for ‘who we are’ or ‘how we want others to think we are’. Attributes that we decide to acquire are heavily influenced by our environment, societal values, by family position, by our parents or lack of parents, teachers, direct experiences, peers and from media sources. What we value and want to acquire as attributes, will largely depend on our emotional and cognitive survival strategy we determined in the prior years and our unique way of viewing the world, and from all our experiences to date. We are all individuals and no person is the same, because everyone has a unique gene pool and set of experiences that shape them. People value many things for attributes, even if they do not seem valuable. Valuable for us, means it helps to get validation from the outside world and from people for that which we believe ourselves to be. We might value being ugly, beautiful, fat, thin, stupid, smart, wise, foolish, rich, poor, helpless, powerful, weak, to name a few. Parents often unknowingly encourage the attaining of these properties to their children, by repeating things to them such as ‘you are so smart or stupid, or ‘you are so pretty or ugly’, or ‘you are good at this or that’. The child then thinks that this is how they are special, accepts it as truth, and builds survival strategies to reinforce and prove it. The most important thing is to receive the validation, not the attribute.

This stage is mainly about proving that our viewpoint is the right one and that we know. The upside defense strategy is about getting validation for what we know, and the downside defense is to fix it when we do not know. After a failure, we think about it and devise a new concept to know more or to be right more often. We will use the new concept until it fails. When we do not get the validation we seek, we are at a loss on what to do. This process continues for most of our life, until we awaken to the futility of this endless concept swapping game and stop doing it. After this long process, our basic belief is, “I think therefore I am.” This belief is a property we value highly and is rarely questioned. This phase is about developing the layer of knowing, we have the need to feel we know and actively seek confirmation that we do know something. This layer is built on top of the layers of seeking self-validation and of seeking for love; all these strategies are constantly in play in the outside world.

The main thing we have been doing all these years is building a structure with a defense system for the structure of personality; it is not about physical survival at all. For this purpose, these properties are very valuable, as the most important thing is to get validation and proof that “I am alive.” We highly value these properties because they are the building blocks to erect our self-image; the quality of the property is not as valuable. This entity does not exist in the real world; rather it exists as a figment of our imagination. The end of growing of the personality stops when the body stops growing. This is approximately when the medial prefrontal cortex has reached final maturity, when we have reached our full height and after eruption of the last wisdom teeth. On average, this is twenty-four to twenty-six years.

Expansion Of Personality & Reproduction (24 – 48 Years)

After our brain has reached full maturation, the basic structure of our personality is fully formed. Now, it is a matter of going out in the world and testing our full power and ability to influence people, places and things. This phase is mostly about expanding on what we have already learned and it’s predominately about accumulating further properties and making ourselves ‘bigger’ in our mind’s eye. The growth occurring here is primarily an accumulation of energy to expand the existing structure of personality, we want to get bigger so we can have more influence and feel ourselves even stronger as the phantom self. We want to influence the world with our knowledge and power, by reproducing ourselves either physically or by getting others to adopt our beliefs or become leaders. We believe we are more likely to survive, and feel stronger the more we can influence the world and other people.

We are mainly occupied with self-expression, reproduction of ourselves both physically and mentally and creating physical things in the outside world and of acquiring even more properties that at this point are mostly power related and external. Properties in this sense includes, career, schooling, degrees, religion, apprenticeship, learning skills, knowledge, marriage, children, starting businesses, getting a house and as many more things as possible. Of course, our driving motivation in all this is looking for love and satisfaction in all physical outside forms and activities as possible. As properties are accumulated and held in place and valued, more energy is needed to keep those structures ‘erected’. Therefore, the more we own and accumulate the less life-force energy we have in a non-fixed form. As this expansion continues, our energetic vibration declines, we become more rigid and eventually health problems will surface.

Male & Female Menopause, Aging & Decline (48 – 96 Years)

Aging accelerates around forty-eight years, and continues unless a transformation of personality occurs. Once the main structural elements of the personality have formed, it is as if the energy in the body gets used to traveling repeatedly on the same fixed pathways. These pathways exist in the brain and have a corresponding flow of energy through the body, which I call the cord of personality.

This creates an imbalance of energy flows in the body. Over time, parts of the body that are not stretched have reduced energy flow and health problems appear in those areas. Other important ways that energy flows are reduced in the body occur when we adopt a new defense strategy to protect ourselves, or by mentally protecting an area of our body from further pain due to a recent trauma, or by projecting a larger than life self-image. It takes much energy to keep this illusion going ‘while in the public eye’.

As time goes on, if the structure of personality is not dismantled, the areas of the body with low levels of energy affect systems related to it, and free energy in the body continues a gradual decline over time. As health problems build, it is like there is never enough energy at night in the sleep period to repair the day’s damage and restore us to full vibrant health. The energy keeps depleting over time and degeneration continues to go on each day, then we see that we are aging.

It is also common near the age of forty-eight, that male and female menopause starts as hormones change and divert energy from reproduction, and thereby returns much energy back to the free pool of energy. This energy gives a boost in awareness and it is common that spiritual awakenings happen then. This can be an important turning point in our life, where we springboard off this energy surge and change our focus away from material pursuits and toward nonmaterial pursuits. Traditionally these are known as the wise years. Remember, what we focus on increases. We can change our focus toward our nonmaterial aspect of higher-self by doing new things such as self-inquiry and meditation. When we do, we will discover the declining path we were on reverses or stalls. As the dissolving of the personality progresses, our energy increases, diseases are healed, and we notice an increase in agility. The kundalini transformation is now under way.

• < The Cord Of Personality
• Human Tendency Is To Stay The Same >

• Prev
• Next