FROM A SITE VISITOR: why do you say I should not have a personality?
F.: So, to review, here are the pointers that address the question:
1. Persons are unconsciously and subconsciously driven and controlled by personality, even as they erroneously believe that they are choosing their thoughts and their words and their actions (resulting in self-delusion and chaos).
2. 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).
3. Under the influence of personality, persons are driven to maintain false images (further hampering any effort to find Self).
4. The assumption of personas is always accompanied by egotism (in an effort to defend false ego-states that are taken to be real), and egotism is at the root of all relative misery.
5. Attachment to personality automatically triggers fears and desires which—in turn—trigger instability and unhappiness.
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, and their fluctuations between exhibiting their "assets" and their "liabilities."
7. Personality prohibits liberation.
8. Personality is a coping tool that children develop to adapt and survive; however, adults allow that childish tool to control them throughout the manifestation unless they Realize.
9. Personality reinforces the illusion of doership, and doership reinforces the acceptance of false identifies (the belief among the non-Realized being, "What I do also defines who I am.").
10. Personality sets persons up for personality disorders.
11. Personality, with its fictitious “assets” and “liabilities,” fosters belief in duality.
12. Because personality is used by children for self-preservation and then maintained by adults, it reinforces childish beliefs in adults about what “self” is.
13. The effect of personality assumption is perceived fear and unmet desires, including the desire for body-mind-personality continuity (which sets persons up to believe in the nonsensical promises contained in dogma, in magical beliefs, and in myths based in ancient superstitions).
14. Personality-driven belief in nonsense prevents persons from finding a sane and sound and reasonable philosophy and encourages them to buy instead into the teachings of various ideologies and cults and religions.
15. Personality fosters nonsensical thinking and childish talk and immature actions since it is formed in childhood, but it dominates persons throughout their adulthood as well.
16. Driven by the influence of personality and its illogical conditioning and programming, the use of logic and reason cannot happen among persons.
17. Persons/Personas, taking their identities to be real, will fight (often to the death) to preserve mirages.
18. Personality is a prerequisite for “psychic disintegration.”
19. Personality assumption and its accompanying psychic disintegration will guarantee that persons will be trapped in delusion and turmoil.
20. At the root of all relative ills is egotism. At the root of egotism is ego (i.e., assumption of the false “I,” of ego-states, of personas, of personality). At the root of all personality is ignorance, namely, ignorance of Self which drives the non-Realized to believe in false identities and inspires their willingness to fight to preserve their images.
The overall result of personality (which inspires ego-state assumption and which fosters its accompanying egotism) is a planet with a population that is dominated by personas, assuming ego-states and using ego-defense mechanisms to defend what amounts to nothing more than a mirage…nothing more than the false images assumed by the non-Realized as identities.
Accepting images as reality, those trapped in personality are thereby trapped as well in self-delusion and arrogance. Arrogance generates a false sense of separation, and the result of persons being driven blindly by egotism and arrogance and a sense of “separation” is one broken relation after another (relatively speaking, of course).
Those broken relations, again relatively speaking, assure that those trapped in personality, egotism, and arrogance will know no stability. When select persons move into the role of arrogant leaders, they will always spread their egotism throughout their cultures. Those cultures will, in turn, tolerate ignorance, fighting, war, killing, mayhem, depression, misery, suffering and chaos.
And THAT is why Realized Advaitins suggest being completely rid of personality identification. Please enter the silence of contemplation.
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