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.