03-16-2017, 12:00 AM
For many people "our personality" is who we "are". I've challenged this notion for some time, defining personality instead as "a set of habits a person has for interpreting and deciding how to act in the world". Who we actually are, I've said, is the person who is observing the world and deciding how to act in it. The distinction being that if our personality is a set of habits, then those can be changed. Indeed, they have. Who still sees the world as an adult the same way they did as a 5 year old? Who still chooses to act the same? Our habits have changed, but not who we "are".
I was listening to a podcast the other day that challenged the concept of personality being who we are even further than I had. The podcast is called "Invisibilia". It's an hour long show put out by NPR with interesting episode titles such as "The Power of Categories", "How to Become Batman", "The Problem with the Solution", and "The Secret Emotional Life of Clothes". You can find it with Google Play on your phones or you can listen to it here. So far I've only listened to 1 episode, "The Personality Myth".
It didn't get as deep into anything as I would have liked, (they asked some questions but didn't try too hard to answer them), but it is worth a listen imho. Instead of looking at personality from a traditional perspective or as a set of habits, the two women narrating the podcast are questioning whether personality exists at all. One example they spend some time with is a woman who visits a prison and meets a few inmates. She is surprised by how charming and sensitive they are, in particular John, an inmate in charge of a ballet they are putting on. Then she discovers that he's doing time for a violent rape and has trouble reconciling how that could fit into the personality of the man she'd just spent hours with. This challenges her notion, (a popular one), that there's something innate about people's character. That a criminal is always a criminal, a violent person is always a violent person, etc. To me it's always been obvious that a personality is fluid, but for many people it's obvious that it is not.
The strongest challenge that they offered to the concept of personality however was the idea that people only act the same because we see them in the same situations all the time. If a person's situation changed drastically, a lot of those traits we think of as core components to their personality might not be there, and other traits we'd never think to associate with them would. This, for us nagually types, begs the question "Is the personality then just the auto-pilot we use when we're not paying much attention to things?".
Taking it one step further, if the auto-pilot doesn't exist, and in reality is just us disassociating from our present environment and allowing our habits to rule, then do we not become at those times mere observers of our own habits? Isn't that where our energy goes, to create a fake self to interact with the environment while we are just watching it?!
What is it that we are trying to protect our truer being from when we do this? Boredom? Pain? Being shunned or judged? If we don't fear these things, then we can dispense with the auto-pilot altogether. Auto-pilot.... flyer. Hmm... I have to agree with the podcast women though. Different situations will threaten us in different ways, thus we will change our auto-pilots as necessary to protect us in them.
What say you, do we have personalities? If not, what is it we mistake for them?
I was listening to a podcast the other day that challenged the concept of personality being who we are even further than I had. The podcast is called "Invisibilia". It's an hour long show put out by NPR with interesting episode titles such as "The Power of Categories", "How to Become Batman", "The Problem with the Solution", and "The Secret Emotional Life of Clothes". You can find it with Google Play on your phones or you can listen to it here. So far I've only listened to 1 episode, "The Personality Myth".
It didn't get as deep into anything as I would have liked, (they asked some questions but didn't try too hard to answer them), but it is worth a listen imho. Instead of looking at personality from a traditional perspective or as a set of habits, the two women narrating the podcast are questioning whether personality exists at all. One example they spend some time with is a woman who visits a prison and meets a few inmates. She is surprised by how charming and sensitive they are, in particular John, an inmate in charge of a ballet they are putting on. Then she discovers that he's doing time for a violent rape and has trouble reconciling how that could fit into the personality of the man she'd just spent hours with. This challenges her notion, (a popular one), that there's something innate about people's character. That a criminal is always a criminal, a violent person is always a violent person, etc. To me it's always been obvious that a personality is fluid, but for many people it's obvious that it is not.
The strongest challenge that they offered to the concept of personality however was the idea that people only act the same because we see them in the same situations all the time. If a person's situation changed drastically, a lot of those traits we think of as core components to their personality might not be there, and other traits we'd never think to associate with them would. This, for us nagually types, begs the question "Is the personality then just the auto-pilot we use when we're not paying much attention to things?".
Taking it one step further, if the auto-pilot doesn't exist, and in reality is just us disassociating from our present environment and allowing our habits to rule, then do we not become at those times mere observers of our own habits? Isn't that where our energy goes, to create a fake self to interact with the environment while we are just watching it?!
What is it that we are trying to protect our truer being from when we do this? Boredom? Pain? Being shunned or judged? If we don't fear these things, then we can dispense with the auto-pilot altogether. Auto-pilot.... flyer. Hmm... I have to agree with the podcast women though. Different situations will threaten us in different ways, thus we will change our auto-pilots as necessary to protect us in them.
What say you, do we have personalities? If not, what is it we mistake for them?