002 - What is Individuality, Personality and Ego?

Hey, you.

Today I’m gonna share what Massara and I have discussed about us as individuals.

We as individuals include the original identity, and then I’ll go over Personality, or what I like to call the Clockwork, and what our teacher Robert Moore calls the Systems-self. I’ll explain stuff like Ego afterward once everything else is in place.

Imagine a circle in front on you.

The exact, perfect center-point of that circle is truly you. You come with the whole circle and over life with more experiences, it grows in size, but the center POINT is always what it is and where it is.

Zoom out just a little bit, that circle is actually a lightbulb.

We’d like to say you’re like the filament in the center of an incandescent lightbulb, but you’re the light - because the filament stays there when the light goes out.

So where does the light come from?

This is episode two, that’s incredibly deep and we’re trying to make this approachable, here.

But there’s no location, we DO know that. And if we’re intelligent enough to question what we are (what the light is), all we have to go off of is to either say “I’m a lightbulb, I guess” or to look around and see what’s lit up around us. (spoiler, both are not the full picture.)

So it’s complicated, what even is light if it’s not the act of lighting things up? THAT is a beautiful question. Just the same question with different words: what are we then, if not the act of living? We’re not awareness with a life, we are Life, and all life has some degree of awareness.

So there. We know what we originally are, that’s a great start.

We’re born into unbelievably complex and beautiful meat machines; with generations of genetic, environmental, psychic and spiritual baggage.

So if we, as the light, identify with the lightbulb that contains us, how do we respond to a world of things that aren’t us? We keep seeking for the light of course! Our natural response is to look outward around us at what’s bright, instead of looking inward to where that Life is at the core.

There is a difference between finding and discerning what it is that we are as the light (good, worth it), and trying to LIVE BY that light off of that lightbulb alone (bad, not worth it).

With the sun, we get so much warmth and light we don’t know what to do with it all. Imagine cooking all our food, growing all our crops, staying warm enough in the winter, etc. by just one lightbulb. Thank God everything gets sunlight evenly, that it doesn’t depend on us to manage or appreciate or cultivate the sunlight. Different seasons in our life may make it feel better or worse of course, but we still count on it.

When you’re not, you could have the brightest, warmest lightbulb, but then YOU have to work to keep it powered. It’s like we’re running on batteries. Seasons of immense sadness or clinical depression are this experience. We’re too far from the Sun, and we’re exhausted because everything that used to be automatic is manual now. A fruit tree does not grind and hustle to be fruitful, it just welcomes the sun into its life and has to get enough water.

That’s the function of us as self-aware light. We seek more of the light and are rewarded when we learn no single persons effort is enough, we have to lean on the fertility of the environment - or leave a fruitless environment to be in one that is healthy.

Our environment is like the soil.

Here’s where we start to get into aspects of Personality.

Imagine, around the you-bulb, there’s a mixture of thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories, smells, textures, etc. It’s this dynamic and very fast moving fluid of “things”, and something Massara has mentioned is that the part of that fluid that’s TOUCHING the lightbulb are the current experience.

Every time something from your current experience touches your light, the memory of that experience gets saved in your machines storage system. Your machine (your bodys’) function is to help you survive; so all of your experiences are filtered to serve that function.

If you have a negative experience, maybe fourty percent of that experience that’s submitted to your memory banks will be the truth of the experience itself, and the other sixty percent will be the exaggerated lies around that experience that your body justifies as “just in case”, to help keep you ready in case that experience comes up again. Those ALL get saved up and clearly, over time that becomes an issue because we’re living more in our biases than in truth. Most of the time, we have to be demonstrated to at some point that there’s a difference between the two, it’s not very often people are given the gift of that discernment without any prompting or lessons.

Now, back to the image of the you-bulb, getting out a little further from that fast-moving warm fluid, the fluid becomes a little thicker and slower moving. This represents all the thoughts and feelings we currently have access to but aren’t on our mind. Further out from that, they get quite slow and thick, and they start to crystallize.

These crystals are where our fluid experience becomes more solid, and our moments become opinions and even habits. It’s at that level where we start to develop favorites and least favorites.

Now THIS part is fascinating:

Since we don’t naturally just “get” our awareness, and we CRAVE to figure out what we are as the Light, we have this nasty way of identifying with those strong feelings around us. The beliefs and favorites and hates.

All that “stuff” is our personality. Massara has mentioned, we use that word to MEAN maturity and self-awareness, but on a much more real and vulnerable level, our personality is what we hold onto. It’s the CENTRAL lie we’ve bought into our whole life, that’s created a narrative about what the world is and who or what we are. Anyone in the personality space will truthfully tell you that the goal behind mastering personality models is to grow OUT OF our personality and the wounds that started them.

Now, this concept of the Ego.

The Ego is a little bit more complicated.

Ego literally means “I”, in Latin. When you look at something that’s not truly you, like your body or your achievements, and you say “yep, that’s me.” That’s the EGO making you think that’s true. You, have been fooled.

It’s our CAPACITY to identify with something. We call it our self-image, but it’s the illusion behind the creation of that self-image; The ego is alive (and is a wonderful and faithful servant), but the self-image is just an image.

Both the Ego and the self-image it creates for us are immensely useful and serve the critical function of also keeping us from being chronically out-of-body or having dissociative identities. The book Psycho-Cybernetics goes over the application of this beautifully and in very plain language.

Finally, the really the popular discussion of “ego-death” in spiritual circles is a metaphor for learning not to fall for its tricks anymore; NOT about actually “killing” or somehow removing the Ego function. Ego-death is finally claiming your Sovereignty and full awareness; and the consequences of being painfully meta-aware most of the time. That's like finally getting through the tutorial of the game that never ends.

I know that got deep, and not all depth is clarity, but we really hope that lends to a lot more clarity for you in your life and understanding others.

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