Essence, Personality, and False Personality

In the fourthway work, there is a distinction between our essence, our personality, and what is called “false personality.” Our essence is who we truly are, our higher selves, and what we strive to align within our everyday life. Our personality is formed from our adaptation to life.

We are all born into different cultures and appropriate qualities of those cultures onto ourselves. We are born into families, races, communities, religions, and attitudes. We are thrown into different flavors of dysfunction from which we must find our way.

How strongly we identify with these things can create enormous likes and dislikes within ourselves in addition to low tolerance for differences.

We have our essence and we have personalities that we acquire to function in the world. These are the roles we play and the likes and dislikes that form as a result. We may believe a certain behavior is inappropriate while someone from another culture sees it as appropriate. We may get locked into roles as a result of our environment or family constellation.

False personality is what we are not.

It is what we believe we are as well as the false image we maintain of ourselves. It is not based on reality whatsoever.

False personality is something we have built up to compensate for weaknesses and shortcomings. It is often based on survival mode and validation from others. Many of our actions, our decisions, and our partners and friends feed that false personality.

When we begin to do conscious work on ourselves, we eventually coalesce the I’s that are interested and committed to this transformation. What forms is an observing I and what the fourthway terms as a “deputy steward.” The deputy steward forms from conscience and the steady work of observing our fragmentation.

We gain strength to recognize false personality for what it is as we collect our “work I’s” together.

We must try to be aware that we are not unified and doing the work of observing is what helps to unite the our disparate parts, the many “I”’s. Though we can be identified with the roles we choose, it is necessary to play roles. We must distinguish when we are identified with those roles as well as with false perceptions of ourselves.

False personality creates tremendous inner conflict as our actions do not sync up with what we believe ourselves to be. We often act in total conflict with these false perceptions. Sometimes it is a very low opinion of self that creates conflict in one way and sometimes it is an inflated sense of self that causes the problem.

Our work here is to discover what our essence is, what our personality is, and what our false personality is. The mechanicalness of false personality is based purely on imagination. We study our mechanicalness to understand the distinction and gain strength to replace it with non-mechanicalness. This creates higher and higher degrees of inner struggle. 

When we start to see these false perceptions of ourselves, we strengthen our essence. It is extremely important to do slow and steady work on this so that when we begin to see who we really are and what we do, we are not totally horrified by what we see. We have strength of essence to bolster the shock.

This week make a list of who you think you are.

Use self-observation to catch yourself being identified with these ideas.

Find examples of how your actions do not match up to your self-perception.

Notice how your actions and decisions are influenced by who you imagine yourself to be.

Notice the inner conflict when things don’t match up to your perception.

Be open to understanding more without having to “figure it out.”