Lesson 17 – How Your Current Personality Was Formed
“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”
BRUCE LEE
Your Personality
Our consciousness as human beings allows us to experience the world outside our skin through our five senses: hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting.
Since birth, we have acquired functional patterns through our parent’s and society’s conditioning and the genetic code in our bodies. Our approach to life is created by the influence of nature and upon our daily activities and longings.
Our life is formed upon planet Earth. Earth is just one of millions of solar systems in the universe. Other potential planets could contain life as we understand it, and these planets are light-years away. Yet, we have no clue whether there is life like ours elsewhere. Still, whether this is or not doesn’t matter. We are learning how to examine our lives to know how things work, and then figuring out how we should best change things is what we need to do.
WE OPERATE WITHIN OUR LOCAL REALITY
So we find our life inside what could be called a local reality – life here on Earth and within our environment.
Our living of this life is made through our five senses, conditioning, and genetic predisposition. We can then become conscious of our relationship to everything else and extend our five senses through scientific instruments and communication tools that reach beyond the range of our voice or beyond the drum beats (which were in earlier times used to send messages to people at a great distance from each other).
So, we live our lives locally. In the past, the extent of that region was defined by the horizon on the water, the following mountain range, the forest, or basically by how far we could see. Compared to that, our local reality for hearing (what you can perceive in terms of spatial information with your eyes closed) is different in its extension and detail. Touch is limited by the distance your arms can reach. So, all of our senses operate differently and, taken together, allow us to be the beautiful organisms that we are.
However, our local reality is far greater today than in the past. Now, we have smartphones, earbuds, a car, Facebook, Google, and many other ways to communicate around the circumference of our Earth.
We can still call it our Local Reality because self-imposed boundaries determine how far we can reach.
You have a local world to which you respond, and I have another. Since you are on my website, our worlds have some overlap, yet we both live within different worlds.
WE EXPERIENCE AND LIVE IN A BOUNDED WORLD
We experience and live in a bounded world when we look at things this way. We can also transport ourselves by foot, bicycle, car, or airplane to other determinate worlds. All these different worlds add to and from our experience and learning of the world beyond our skin.
Due to our journey through life, we carry memories, thoughts, emotions, behavior patterns, and models in our heads and bodies. This journey starts at birth. We all come into the world pretty much the same way. We go out uniquely—every one of us is unique. Between those two events, we live out the story of our lives.
HOW OUR UNIQUE PERSONAL STORY IS CREATED
How the story is written depends upon the input and messages we have received in the past and how we have internalized them. This story depends upon the inputs we receive every moment and how we respond to them. It develops in response to our resistance, expectations, and hopes.
The difficulty for our perceptual apparatus, for hearing and seeing, for example, is that we are constantly exposed to information from our local reality. Even though we become rigid after a while (in the way we look at things), we are constantly bombarded by this information.
Our perceptual apparatus has to divide the world we live in into a foreground and a background. Otherwise, we cannot handle the flow of information.
WE DIVIDE THE WORLD INTO A FOREGROUND & BACKGROUND TO HANDLE THE INFLOW OF INFORMATION WE EXPERIENCE
We need to know what the background is, what is consistent, and what does not require attention to notice changes in the background that might carry information to which we had better pay attention. It is the movement against a background, whether it is a visual or a sonic background, that draws our attention. All of our senses are primarily change detectors. Come into a room that smells bad. After a while, you probably no longer notice it. But then go out the door, and you will relish the fresh air.
It’s the same with hearing.
This conversation brings us to the Association Model of Perception or AMP. This general model combines what I have just shared and eludes to what is hidden behind “the open secret” of life and living.
This model not only brings to consciousness the patterns in your response to the realities beyond your skin, but also to a dimension beyond, which touches and enters you through Intuition. Intuition comes from outside of ourselves and is there to quietly guide us if we can listen to it and interpret these requests properly.
THE HUMAN BRAIN PROCESSES INFORMATION QUICKLY
You perceive your physical environment through your five sensory transducers: eyes, ears, skin, tongue, and nose. Electrical signals from your various sensors are transmitted to your brain, dedicating a model of your physical environment from them. The brain considers associations with memories, emotions, love, fear, traumas, pain, suffering, death, love acceptance, laughter, joy, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, education, thought patterns, skills, convictions, experiences, and acts. This can be a time-consuming process before perception and cognition occur. But the human brain is quite a computer, making this process seem almost immediate.
The survival of the species requires fast processing of incoming data. This is done by sorting the incoming data streams into static and transient streams. Temporary or changing data streams get the first attention.
THE FOREGROUND GETS ATTENTION & A RESPONSE
The external visual or acoustic scene is divided into background and foreground. The foreground gets attention and a response, which is most appropriate in the context of the present background. Decisions and actions have been taken before you know what has happened. This occurs in the part of the brain which is hard-wired for survival and with which you were born.
YOUR RESPONSES ARE SUBJECTIVE AFTER PROCESSING
Perception and recognition, which occur after the input data has been processed via associations, lead to entirely subjective responses. They are often not appropriate in the context of the external reality. Instead, they are responses that come out of various forms of resistance to the external reality.
The storyteller in your head is the commentator on your journey through life, which may take you from Self-consciousness to Consciousness, of Relationships and Connectedness to Enlightenment, and through a race to Recognition. Along the way, your storyteller is ready to devise excuses, justifications, and explanations for your actions and inactions.
ALL OF THIS HAPPENS WITHIN THE FIELD OF LOVE
Regardless of the nature of your actions and the consciousness that creates them, they take place in an all-encompassing, energetic field of LOVE. That is difficult to accept but becomes apparent when resistance is dropped.
HENCE, YOUR JOURNEY THROUGH LIFE IS UNIQUE
The whole journey through life involves paying attention to inputs and responding physically, mentally, intuitively, and emotionally. What needs to be learned is that resistance is futile. Battles are fought for Peace and not for Dominance. Ours is a planet of Balance. What would you do and be if you did not have a brain? A tree does not need a brain. It is genetically hard-programmed to head toward sunlight.
What is the essence of life and living?
A good answer is To respond without resistance. That requires letting go of attachments.
However, to do this, you must know exactly WHO YOU ARE. You must fully understand what I came here TO DO WITH MY LIFE. And . . . to obtain those two answers, you need first to answer a 3rd question: How Does The Universe Work and why? This is the 1st answer you must receive to answer the other two about yourself.
———————————
Answer those three questions and learn to respond to life’s inputs without resistance, and you can find your place in this world and fully enjoy the experience.
———————————
Anything less, and you will not experience the most out of life. You will probably lead an unfulfilled life and always wonder what it’s all about. It’s really up to you, despite your prior conditioning.
This course will help you understand these concepts and become who you should be – the real you (if you are interested).
Keep going. Go through every lesson, one at a time, and take your time doing this. Savor each lesson as though it will be your last; you’ll gain the tools to remove some of the roadblocks you’ve created.
You will notice that I mention “you have created.” Your entire reality is created by “you” and how you respond to the various inputs that come your way. Find out who you really are and become that instead. Do not let your conditioned response to those inputs cover the real you and prevent it from surfacing. That is my challenge to you and the purpose of this course.
Keep going!