Personality and Character
In Sacred Attention Therapy we use the terms personality and character like this: Character is the sum of inward processes of dynamic exchange and creativity that take place in the individual’s inner world. Character is created out of the interaction of outside forces with inner tendencies. These tendencies may be the reactive residue from previous encounters with the outer world, inherent in the individual's nature, and may include inherited, generational influences. The character is essentially defensive and designed to protect and inhibit any threat or incursions toward the essence or core self to ensure individual survival.
Personality is the outward expression of character. Hence it is also essentially defensive. The term as we use it here doesn’t imply that personality is defensive — or aggressive — centrally, and that apart from that it is more peripherally open, receiving, catalytic, or conducive to authentic interaction. It means that personality defends our authentic self, or core essence, from the outside world. Personality adapts the basic components, assumptions, and tendencies of character to an outer meeting with a presumed hostile world. Personality ranges across a continuum between aggression and defense, action and passivity, male and female qualities. It performs the task of relationship with the outside world. Residing on the borderline between the inner and outer worlds, it appears as the individual’s mask, facade, or persona. Problems arise when the individuals identify with the personality as themselves.
Excerpt from SAT Online Training, Level 1 lecture manuscript
https://www.centerforhumanawakening.com/SAT-Online-Training-Is-It-For-You.html
Serving your personal journey toward enlightenment
7 年Richard Harvey’s article “Personality and Character” was concise in its differentiation between character and personality. In summary, character is the sum of inward dynamics that is expressed outwardly through our personality. Our character and personality, however, are merely defense mechanisms to the realization of our divine essence. It’s a circuitous journey isn’t it? The journey of return to where we started the journey in the first place. Think about it…we seemingly come into this world through a birth process. From the instant we are born into this world, we are bombarded with stimuli that immediately begins to shape and form our existence in this world. The development of our character and personality begins the moment we are born. Interestingly, for me, our character and personality are protective mechanisms to guard us from our fears and perceived threats to existence. Our character and personality is predominantly manipulative in nature to ensure our survival through the ‘drawing close to’ or avoiding of all experience. We gravitate toward that which we want and retreat from that which we want to avoid. We have a tendency to meander through life and spend a great deal of effort to attract what we want and avoid what we don’t want. Why try so hard? Why not just let life flow? Why not just give over to life on its terms and go where the current flows us? It would take a great deal of trust to give over to life on its terms. It would take a fear-less-ness to allow life to unfold, to not resist the current. For many, our entire paradigm of life as we know it would need to shift in order for us to not resist life. At the base, the core, of it all we would have to develop a new relationship with what we perceive as life and death. All of our struggle with life, on one level or another, is not about our struggle with life at all. It is our struggle with death. We struggle to avoid death. We do very strange things to avoid death. We go to great lengths to avoid having to think about, deal with, and come face-to-face with death. It is perhaps the greatest paradox of all that only through the acceptance of our death can we truly live. Giving over to life is the giving over to death. Nothing is accomplished in death. We can only accomplish anything in and through life. For birth is not the beginning of life and death, in the conventional sense, is not the end of life.