Authentic vs. Inauthentic Personality

This blog is called “Authentic Personality”, but I have not addressed what that means to me. The original sub-title was ‘Is there such a thing?’. I didn’t write that, snackrabbit did. He set up this blog for me and playfully added that. So I thought I would write something about Authentic Personality and what it might be.

Our personality represents the way in which we engage the world. We engage it through our personality. We might be honest, or a crook, bold or shy, hard working or lazy. All of these are sort of patterns in how we engage the world. I say patterns because these traits are by no means static. An ‘honest’ person might tell a lie, or a generally hard working person might blow off his responsibilities for a weekend. But generally we have these collections of traits that when taken as a group represent our personality. It is through our personality that people know us and they interact with us based on what they see. Yes. Like people probably wouldn’t choose to rely on me because I am seen as a flake - not always, but if you want someone to water your plants maybe you should ask Icecrown. So that is interesting. Our personalities also are strenthened with how people interact with us. People regarding us as some way or another strengthens our own view of what our personality is. So people interact with our personality, and so do we. I have an internal sort of representation of traits that I assign to myself based on my history.

And that I think is the key to what is authentic and inauthentic personality. My personality comes from my history. Even though I said before that personality traits are not static I tend to believe they are. I automatically think that those patterns are a big part of ‘me’. I believe in them as if they are solid. But they generally come from my history or more specifically, how I and others remember history. I don’t know about you but I have no control over my history. Things come and go. People affect me and then they trail off. But all of these seemingly random things affect my personality. So my personality is a reflection of my history - it is not my own. It is not authentic. Do you see? I did not decide from moment to moment exactly how I would respond to things, indeed I reacted based on previous memory. My dad recently recounted some sort of interaction we had when I was a kid. I was failing classes all over the place and he said, “Chris, just promise me that you will do your homework for one week”. I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t promise that”. Why couldn’t I promise that? Because in my memory it was unprecedented but by verbalizing that it became a ‘personality trait’. But really I could have done my homework for a week. My mind worked, my body worked. I could have done it. But I thought there was something in me that was solid that actually meant that I could not do the work. So I didn’t do the work! And then not doing the work carried on and affected other traits, building up more and more personality. But this was not really under ‘my’ control at all. Generally everything that we do is based on our history and we believe that it is unchangeable. If we are stressed we don’t believe that we could also be not stressed. If we are jealous we can’t imagine that we could just put that down. Why? Because it just isn’t ‘me’ to put things down!

So what is authentic personality? Well, I think that starts with realizing that our identity is not so frozen. Our peronality is empty. We don’t have to think, ‘that’s not me’. We don’t have to hold on to things like that. The personality is empty of being a certain way. So no-personality is authentic personality. I don’t mean by ‘no-personality’ some sort of ‘robot’ personality. It just is sort of an internal thing to start to get into this idea that our personality it totally open! We are not solid and heavy like that. We can be truely open and responsive to our situation. Our personality display can then be used to help other people. When you are sad, I am sad. When you are happy, I am happy. An authentic personality helps to truely relate to others and to free us from our Karma - or our history. Without that burden, without that baggage we become truely useful, truely happy. We can live in the moment and invite eveyone else to play in that space.

So that is what this site is about really. Exploring that nature of emptiness. I hope to show that things are really very open and that we don’t need to be just a collection of personality traits and opinions. That type of thinking helps you get into certain clubs, but it won’t help you to be a truely happy and helpful person.