What Is The Personality?

The personality is a combination of emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral response patterns of an individual. These response patterns are mostly habitual, and create an energetic expression where we identify with this energetic expression as ourselves. Personality exists owing to two parts, as is true for all things that exist. Part of personality is physical and part of personality is energetic. The physical aspect is the visible animation of our body when we express ourselves and the energetic aspect is our source energy that fueled our self-expression. Personality is an intermediate structure in our evolution as human beings. This structure is primarily formed in the brain and results from the current combination of DNA instructions that are activated.

Human beings have developed personalities because that is what their soul energy and DNA currently can create. Our physical aspect reflects our actuality, but our spirit contains our potential, not yet manifest. All forms are composed of two parts, the unformed source energy and the reflected aspect, the visible created and manifest form. The created form reflects the current capability of The Creator within. Most of us are identified with our created visible aspect, but ‘visible aspect’ means it is merely a reflection in the mind.

Ability To Self-Reflect Gives Our Sense Of Self

A significant part of what we know as the personality is our ability to process thought. Our inner energetic source is not visible, but when we think, the thought is a physical form that can be observed. Thinking makes consciousness visible. Mirror neurons (more on that below) in our brain give us the capability to internally think things over when we encounter various stimuli. The main difference between human beings and other life forms, in that we are capable to self-reflect, to see our thoughts and to be aware of ourselves in the world and what effect we have on it. Animals cannot recognize themselves in a mirror, but people can by the age of two years. The ability to recognize ourselves and be self-conscious is an intermediate evolutionary step toward enlightenment.

Most people understand their personality is themselves, it is the ‘me’ we are all familiar with. Yet, what many people do not see is that this ‘me’ is primarily made by internal reflection made possible by the complexity of the organization of the brain.

Mirror Neurons

Recent brain research has identified specialized neurons in the brain called mirror neurons, which development in the human infant is encouraged from the activity of imitation. Mirror neurons allow us to process information from the outside that we have picked up with our senses and reflect it within to give it a value. Science has shown that when we want to recall the sound of a peanut snapping, what we do is replay a scenario in our brain of holding a peanut and snapping it. When we watch a person picking up an item the same neurons fire in our brain and activate motor sensors in the same fingers, we saw the person using to pick up the item. The mirroring capability of the human brain is advanced, and animals with high intelligence all have some mirroring capability. The mirroring capability gives the illusion we are seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting things. The sensing is occurring in our mind and nervous system but the illusion generated seems so real that it traps us in our mind.

Halves Of Brain Correspond To Motor And Sensory Nervous System

Our brain is organized into halves, which correspond to our motor and sensory nervous system. One-half of our brain processes information and makes decisions and the other half receives information. Our sensory system picks up signals from the outside as vibrations and characterizes them according to the sensitivity of the sense, so we get sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. This information is then sent to the brain along the sensory tract to the right hemisphere for feeling interpretation and is processed in the left-brain with the mirroring functionality. After receiving information we can decide to act on what we have encountered, which then sends charges down the motor neuron tract into the body, allowing us to move various muscles and our body according to what we have decided to do.

We are all familiar with conscious control of our body with voluntary muscle movement. We want to read that book, we decide to pick it up, our arm muscles charge with energy and we can pick up the book and read it. This seems a great thing; we choose and can move our body according to how we decided. Well, it is more than most animals can do, because they can only react in mostly instinctive ways to what presents. In human beings, there is the capability in the middle to think it over and choose how to react to modify our behavior.

Personality & Split-Brain Organization

The phenomena of personality partly exists in human beings, because of the way that the brain is organized into left and right hemispheres and the mirroring capability, which creates a distortion in how we see the world and ourselves and interact with it. This split organization of the brain is reflected throughout the body. The main distortion occurring is information is mirrored in the mind, and with our ability to mirror we process images. We tend to interact with the world all in the space of our mind. We are not seeing, hearing or experiencing what is occurring in the outside world in ‘real time’. Because we are occupied with processing information after an event has happened, it is similar to living our life always in the past. The continual processing of information blinds us to what is occurring now.

This results in the distinctly human capability to reflect on our thoughts and feelings. We can manipulate complex images, daydream, recall memories and project into the future. While this describes the basic process, many of us are not aware enough to observe our thoughts and feelings that occur constantly as reactions to stimuli. If we look closely, we will see we are rarely present to observe what is occurring in real time. We are rarely present to see what is unfolding now. We cannot see that our reactions are responses to things that no longer exist. Not knowing about our internal processing, we do not know how our experiences, biases and judgments are internally coloring what we see.

What Is Me?

When we do not understand how our mind, nervous system and reactions work, we react in an autopilot fashion in habitual and instinctive ways to stimuli. The main autopilot response that happens is we use most of our attention for the task of thinking. From the thinking process, emotions are generated according to the undertone of our thoughts. Emotions are reflected in the muscles in the face and body, where an actual energetic charge goes into the muscles that animate, showing what we are feeling. For most of us, thinking occurs during all waking hours and manifests as continual chatter (mind-chatter) or talking to ourselves (mind-voice). We rarely ‘shut up’, and take pause to reflect on events and review our reaction we had to it.

When we are not aware of our constant chatter, we cannot listen to another person nor have a meaningful conversation. We cannot see and experience what is going on in the world around us. Chattering creates blindness because while we are occupied with processing stimuli with our thinking, our attention is turned inward. With our mind organization, we can only put our attention on one thing at a time. When our attention is turned inward with thinking, we simply are not ‘present’ to see what is happening in the outside world. Reality unfolds real-time and we miss it often because we are busy thinking. When we think, we are always processing information from events that have already past. In the non-awakened human, thinking is an automatic and reflexive reaction that happens every time we encounter events. If we are not knowledgeable about this reaction of mind-chatter, then we are blind.

Immediately after we meet someone, our mind kicks in to make the person understandable to us, by giving them identifiers. Thinking is done with our ability to process images and recall memories. What we think is thus heavily influenced by our experiences. If we meet a new person, they may remind us of someone we knew from our past. Now we see that person like the person we knew from the past. Alternatively, we may meet an old acquaintance and remember how they were. We do not take the time to see how they are today; instead, we see them how they were through our memory. They can be a different person than our recollection but we cannot see it. If it’s someone we don’t know then we categorize them as pretty, ugly, gay, straight, religious, white collar, smart, stupid, tall, short, thin, colored, rich, poor, famous, or any of numerous labels. When we categorize the pure data, we no longer see the person as they are without our labels. In all these cases, we have not looked into the eyes of the other person and simply felt who they were, all of our interacting with them occurred in the mind. Many people rarely meet or see each other and have the true capability to listen and hear each other. These kinds of fake interactions go on all over the planet, it is like both people are immersed in their internal world and neither can see or connect truly with the other. I wrote a poem, which summarizes the problem more succinctly.

Lost in inside world
making sense of images
connecting the dots.
Isolated bubble views
a planet full of dreamers.

If we understood this happens owing to how our brain is organized and from our old habit of focusing our attention in the mind, then we would clearly see what is making us blind and be motivated to drop the habit. A big reason why we are hooked on this habit is because the mind-chatter produces the feeling of ‘me’ and of having a personality. The internal sound of the reflected thoughts and mind-voice gives us our feeling of self. Before this topic is understood, the ‘me self’ is precious to us, and we are very afraid to discover that this self is not real. To acknowledge this truth, means that who we thought we were was a lie, and we have no idea what we would be without this illusion. To acknowledge this truth is like dying, because we have nothing known to attach to when the illusion is shattered. The ‘me self’ is a phantom of vibration energy, projected from our imagination and ability to emote, which we have created and maintain owing to our unique ability to focus energy inward with the capabilities of our mind. This phantom is so precious to us, that we will fight to the death to protect our illusion, rather than admit that how we are is a lie.

Brain Plasticity

If the section above, explaining why we are blinded by our mind, was not enough to convince us to start the journey of self-realization this one may be a stepping-stone. Brain plasticity research is showing that a contributing cause of old-age forgetfulness and dementia is owing to people responding to life by repeating the same program. When we continue to respond to life from what we learned long ago, it is similar to creating a track in our brain from using the same response. Overtime by using the same responses, it reduces the capability of the brain to learn new things, it drains overall energy and eventually memory problems surface. The brain becomes static and rigid and loses elasticity to learn new things over time. Research is showing that this situation is not something that we have to accept as part of our future. They have seen that new neurons are made and regenerate when we challenge ourselves to learn new things, thus more energy flows in the brain resulting in a more robust, healthy and elastic brain. Prior to this, it was not known that neurons could grow and regenerate. Besides doing meditation, which is more effective, learning new things is a good measure to ward off problems such as old-age forgetfulness, dementia and decreasing health.

• < Q270: “How am I escaping from reality?”
• Caricature Of Personality >

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