FROM A SITE VISITOR: Like Raja, I’m new to Advaita--but never had any religious training. It is easy enough to know that I am more than a body but why do you say I should not have a personality? Thank you.
F.: The Advaitin “journey” to Full Realization begins with an abandonment of body-mind-personality identification. To understand why personality is included in that trio, you are invited to take certain facts about personality into consideration.
First, there are only nine basic personality types. By the age of 5 or 6, spaces-cum-consciousness are assumed to be "persons" and to have developed "their own distinguishing personality." Those familiar with the nine types know that is nonsense, realizing how every Type One actually thinks and talks and behaves like all other Type Ones. The level of predictability and commonality is textbook, and personality does not "distinguish" but actually makes for a lack of distinction, relatively speaking, among all who are of the same type.
All persons become dominated by their primary personality type, though most will eventually disintegrate and "split" into four or five other types as the consciousness becomes more and more warped or blocked. That is one part of the “personality” discussion. The second part is the adoption of scores of other personas—other false identities—that will unconsciously and subconsciously drive the thoughts, words, and deeds of the non-Realized.
Being unconsciously and subconsciously driven by personality type(s) and the desire to maintain false images/assumed roles, the non-Realized erroneously believe that they are choosing their thoughts and their words and their actions but are actually not choosing anything at all.
As evidence, you may use this analogy: suppose that you are in a car and being driven. In that instance, you are in the passenger seat, the back seat, or the trunk. In either case, you are not behind the steering wheel. Being driven, you have no say about where you go, when you go, how you go, etc. Therefore…
1. …under the influence of personality, persons experience a false sense of being split, of being many things (hindering the consciousness from being aware of the Oneness)
2. …under the influence of personality, persons are driven to maintain false images (further hampering any effort to find Self)
3. …under the influence of personality, persons think they are making choices when they are not (the height of self-delusion and a formula for chaos and unhappiness and disaster, relatively speaking)
4. …the assumption of personas is always accompanied by egotism (in an effort to defend false ego-states that are taken to be real) as well as a sense of being “special” or “different.”
While Realized Advaitins know that there is no such thing as “different,” persons (the non-Realized) are attached to (and convinced of) their false sense of being “special” and “unique” and “different.”
Furthermore,
5. ...attachment to personality automatically triggers fears and desires which—in turn—trigger instability and unhappiness. Why?
Instability guarantees that periods of happiness and unhappiness will alternate. Too, that which makes a person happy at a certain point will make that same person miserable at another:
“I love this person” first becomes “I see now that I really didn’t know him/her when I got involved” and then can become “I hate this person”; or “I loved that person and was happy, but she/he died (or left); now, I’m miserable.” The same fluctuations happen with jobs and houses and friends, ad infinitum. Thus…
6. …personality, rooted in duality as it is, will always entrap persons in their relative fears and desires, their loves and hates, their happiness and unhappiness, their stability and their instability.
Are you beginning to see why Advaitins offer pointers inviting persons to be free of personality? Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
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