When I was in grade school, one of my favorite games was called “Pick-Up-Sticks.” This game was played with a cylinder-shaped container filled with slim 10-inch sticks. These sticks were dumped out into pile, and the game was to pick out one of the sticks without moving any other stick in the rest of the pile. The players took turns until one player made one of those other sticks move. He or she was then out of the game. The game proceeded until only one player remained, the winner.
While reading in one of A.H. Almaas’ books about the psychology of personality, I recalled those piles of Pick-Up-Sticks. According to that psychology, our personality is a complex of “object-relations.” In other words, our personality is a stack of habits, each tiny habit referred to as an “object relation.” Each object-relation is an ongoing dialogue between some object and the “I” of that person.
If I picture each object-relation as like one of those pick-up-sticks, I can view one end of each stick as a memory of another person or thing and the other end as a memory of a unique “I” in dialogue with that person or thing. Each of these sticks represents a habit of operation—one dialogue habit in a pile of habits that form my personality. Such object relations might be: I—nipple, I—mother, I—father, I—sister, I—best friend, and scores of ever-more complicated object relations laid in on the top of the earliest ones forming my unique, complex habit structure that define the meaning of the word “personality.”
So at least for the purpose of this essay, let “personality” mean such a complex pile of habitual thoughts, feelings, memories, default operations and basic dramas built up over a unique life history. Some of these object-relations rehearse powerful dramas that have had big impacts upon the whole personality pile of habits. Perhaps an early relationship with father or mother still stirs up significant drama in the psyche. Perhaps some huge trauma plays this role. Perhaps some especially meaningful time plays a big role. Very early dramas often have a good deal of unconscious influence over more recent dramas.
No one is fully conscious of his or her entire personality pile of habits, but good therapies can help us become more aware of our personality fabric and thus more capable of being more intentional in our relations with our personality. Perhaps we can compensate for it, live somewhat beyond it, or discover a level of freedom we can have that is not simply a robotic acting out of our personality karma. We can discover that personality can be a prison in which we are unconsciously trapped.
Nevertheless, we would not want to be without our personality; it serves as the default pattern for large portions of our living. We would not want to learn all of those useful ways of relating afresh in every moment. Habits can be good. I am content for a lot of my personality to operate without my conscious attention. At the same time, I can become aware that some aspects of my personality produce difficulties that interfere with the optimal living of my current life. My life in this current here/now of conscious living can become more aware of these personality forces and, with that awareness, be more decisive in adding or subtracting from these largely automatic personality operations. With awareness comes more freedom.
Personality and Freedom
How does our grasp of such personality wisdom inform our spirit journey into our ever-deeper awareness and thereby into the full depths of our essential freedom? A personality can act as both an enabler of living and as a prison that restrains our essential freedom. A personality operates somewhat like a container in which I live. Like a prison cell, our personality container provides room within its boundaries for our essential freedom to move around. At the same time, the cell of personality has walls that restrain our freedom. And we may not even know that we are restrained until some challenge we are unable to handle brings our personality traps into awareness.
So how is it that I become free to move into that wider “space” of awareness and freedom that is my essential nature and my deeper potential? To move into wider spaces, we need to become aware of our traps. Here is the basic structure of a trap. You have come to think you know who you are. This view is built from your past experiences, but it is just a view that you have built. Perhaps you have heard yourself say, “Oh, I could never do that.” But then one day, you actually do what you said you could never do. Such moments let you see that you cling very strongly to who you think you are.
It may be deeply frightening to learn that you do not know who you are, and that you never will know who your are. You are always more than you think, and different than you think you are. You are a vast mystery, even to yourself. Your essential freedom means that you are not anything solid or stationary, but alway in process. In its full essence, freedom is raw creation—rendering acts that are caused by nothing other than freedom itself. Freedom is not an identity you can put to thought, but a process of choosing. We might say that freedom is a nothingness—a nothingness that creates somethings.
And while our personality was built of the genetic and social materials provided, our specific personality was built by our own mysterious radical freedom. Our genetic and social materials are just materials, not causes that explain this “living being” we are calling “personality.” My choices from infancy onward built this prison of habits that form my personality. I did not build my personality to be a prison; I built it to survive. And I did survive. I don’t want to be without my personality: it is my default pattern of operation. Yet as I become more aware of my freedom, I become aware that my personality is also functioning as a prison, a prison from which I can want to escape and from which I can move into a wider being of my being.
Even if my acts are fated by a personality that I cannot escape, I and my personality are still guilty of those acts. That guilt cannot be handled by arguments blaming fate for my acts, rather than myself. I myself am to blame for what I cannot correct and for all the continuing consequences of my various habits. My only help for my guilt is the forgiveness of Profound Reality, and a fresh start in realism.
Even after a fresh start, I have a limited ability to modify my personality. I can compensate for my personality establishment. I can, however, make limited alterations in my personality, and I have possibilities for acting beyond my personality patterns. Even though my long-established personality patterns will continue as default learnings, I have no excuse to be a mere slave of this interior personality establishment. If I want realism in my living and authenticity in my person, response-able freedom comes as part of my overall package of human authenticity and realism.
My essential freedom is not an accomplishment. Freedom is a gift, and my recovering of that gift is also a gift. I never get to take credit for being my freedom, but I do get credit for not being my freedom. Being my freedom is a 100% surrender to the way my life is—that is, to the way my life actually is beneath all the layers of unfreedom that I have substituted for my freedom. Willingly being my freedom is an undoing of unfreedom, rather than an adding of freedom to my essential being. Freedom is my core self, and I have no other core except freedom and its companion gifts of the trust in the trustworthiness of Profound Reality and that mysterious Love for all neighboring beings.
Freedom is a powerful potential to do free deeds, deeds I do with my own freedom. Here is the paradox of being free: I am 100% dependent upon Reality for my freedom, and I am 100% response-able to enact my freedom or to lose it into some self-created slavery. Freedom is both a glorious gift of opportunity for the living of my authentic life, and a serious demand—a calling to be free with my own freedom.
Response-ability is Not Control
The Response-ability of freedom is a strong power that bends the course of future time for myself, my society, and my planet, but freedom is not in control of the future. We humans are limited beings. We are limited by the powers of nature—gravity, the weather, sickness, the strength of our bodies, the length of our lives. We are limited by the freedom of other people. We are limited by the willful unrealism of other people, and much more. We make our choices and actions as prayers for a future that may or may not happen. And the future never happens exactly as we plan it. The future is not in my control. That which finally controls the future, I am calling “Profound Reality.” And this Profound Reality can be my God-devotion.
So we might say that a chosen deed intends a result, but the result is “in the hands of God.” That is, Profound Reality is like a great dialogue partner. I act, and Reality gives the results in response to which I act again, and again Reality gives me a result. Reality always answers our acts with a result. Then we get to chose again, if we are willing to keep choosing to be our freedom. Reality grants us the freedom to dialogue with Reality about the results of our lives. Such living can never be called “in control.” It might as well be called “obedience” to Reality. Here again is this paradox: my obedience to Reality includes embracing my freedom—a response-ability granted by Reality. In each and every moment, we might be granted the ability to receive that freedom and enact it.
However paradoxical this may sound to our finite minds, we are determined by the course of things to be free to decide, and thus change, in some measure, the course of things. We meet forks in the road, and we opt for real alternatives. In doing this opting, we either opt for the freedom to decide those options, or we we opt to allow ourselves to be driven by forces other than our freedom. Perhaps this other force is our personalty. Perhaps this other force is our social conditioning. There are an enormous number of operating forces, but none of them are to blame for our conscious choices. We are response-able and thereby responsible for being our freedom or for giving away our freedom to some of these other forces.
We are mistaken if we choose to think that we are in control, or if we choose to think that we are completely in the power of an already determined fate. We are not in control, nor are we merely an awareness that is standing by and watching this grand dance of life dancing in us and around us. If we are merely standing by, we are choosing this “standing-aside role” for our lives. Our choices to stand aside rather than be our response-able choices make a huge difference in the overall outcome of our living. It is our basic choice to choose to enact our essential freedom—the freedom from all personality constructions, from all social conditioning, from all addictions, from all forces whatsoever except that powerful nothingness of our essential freedom. We are being given by Reality the power to dialogue with Reality.
Becoming aware of the lies that deny our freedom might be called “awakenment.” This awakenment does not mean that I no longer have my personality, or that I need a different personality than the one I have. Awakenment simply means that my personality has ceased to be a prison, and has become instead a useful part of my life—more like an arm or a leg than an identity.
The truth of our raw freedom remains a mystery in spite of all our talk about it. Our conscious can be aware of our freedom, even though our minds cannot fathom the enigmatic quality of that freedom. The mind seeks to give its topics stable substance, but freedom is not stable, nor is freedom a substance.
Nevertheless, freedom is a necessity of human life that cannot be escaped, even though our lives are littered with acts of attempted escape. Profound Reality remains sovereign over our lives in the sense that freedom is demanded. However much we try, no one escapes from living the demanding response-ability of our essential freedom, any more than anyone escapes birth or death. We are totally determined to be free, however paradoxical that sounds, and however persistently we manage to avoid being our full freedom. We are essentially free, however trapped in unfreedom we may also still find our lives.
Conclusion
In the year 1960, I wrote a poem that began with this line: “God waits to decide what the future will be until I decide who I will be now.” This affirmation of radical freedom to bend the course of history has characterized my religious faith all these intervening years. I have also long viewed this radical freedom being referenced when I read verses of Christian Scripture like the following:
Plant your feet firmly, therefore, within the freedom that Christ has won for us, and do not let yourselves be caught again in the shackles of slavery. Paul, Galatians 5:1 J. B. Phillips