WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

“To be or not to be”, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles.
So said Shakespeare in Hamlet. We are social animals, which leads us to the idea of life being relationships. How to understand relationships, with our work, money, power, society, nature and the universe?

Looking at ourselves in the relationship mirror, what do we do and how we do it in relation to others, observing what we think and feel.
Personality, our mask, the image that we have of ourselves, what we believe we are with all our identifications.

Personality, the rules of behaviour according to your identifying with the role you`re playing, be it carpenter, electrician, notary, priest, judge, politician or president of a government.

This represents the Ego, as in I feel, I think, I know, which is the image we or others have of ourselves, made up of our experiences, our personal stories, our place of birth, social class and education.

To escape our personality, it`s necessary to observe it, paying attention to what we think, why we think it, our emotions, how our character feels and all its automatic reactions.

Thought is another identification or attachment; we also believe we are what we think about the world and life. Although thought is a perfect tool for work, emotions, anxieties or suffering are interpretations of the reality which we ourselves give form to and so they become present in our thoughts. Social values and prejudices are subjective assessments of reality, open to influences.
To escape our thoughts, it`s necessary to closely observe our shifts of thought and emotion and the freedom we feel in discovering ourselves.

There`s a sequential period of time where there`s a movement, the movement of life, in permanent change.

But at a real level this is another level of confusion because the Past is made up of memories and of course they can, to a greater or lesser degree, condition the present, but they are nothing more than a memory.

The Future is merely made up of projections of reality that may or may not happen, but are nothing more than speculation.

We are the Present, the only reality is what is happening here and now; the difficulty is connecting with the present because of the distractions of what we believe we are, because we live in the memories of the past or in our future projections. What is the best moment?

The only one that exists, the Present.

Energy as a potential for action in relation to material and the multiple functions that the human body carries out, of which we are hardly aware:

• The Heart beats 70 times and pumps 5 litres of blood per minute.
• The Lungs inhale and exhale 5 or 6 litres of air per minute.
• The Stomach carries out important digestive processes.
• The Liver and Kidney cleans our blood.
• The Brain carries out millions of processes as well, which allow us to carry out a multitude of tasks, such as thinking, talking, reading, singing and dancing.

All these processes are automatic and we only remember them when we have a headache or a stomach pain or when we have difficulty breathing.

We are a focal point of consciousness, which allows us to observe the world, paying attention to our relationship with it, our trains of thought, how it feels to breathe, putting up with pain; this is in fact the basis of meditation and indeed love.

The essence of human beings, of the deep ego, is found in the freedom from our attachment to our character, thoughts and time. Through the observation of our character, in relation to everyone else, and in paying attention to what we think and our emotions, we can direct our thoughts to live in the Present.