The Art of Breaking Character

1 :: All peak moments in life involve the temporary dissolution of the character: beauty, love, ecstasy, creativity, oneness. ::

2 :: Beneath the mask of the character is a world of potential that yearns to be born into the light. Denying this for a lifetime deadens us. Opening up to it gradually – lifting the lid on Pandora’s box an inch at a time – we find we are continually revitalised by the integration of parts of us we did not know we contained. ::

3 :: The human condition is a state of near-perpetual delusion. Those of us who are not forced to do jobs we hate and to live in conditions of poverty, depravity or oppression believe ourselves to be free – and yet we find ourselves spending an extraordinary amount of time wrestling with the past and the future in the internal space in which our thoughts run riot over our ability to rest peacefully in the present. We are anxious, self-conscious people, living inside mental stories we have learnt to believe are the reality of our lives, stories we are so identified with that we imagine them to be our personality. This is the character from which we must break free if we are to discover how much more, and how much happier, we are capable of becoming. ::

4 :: When most of the spiritual traditions and religions we know of now began, the technologies available for breaking character were very limited – hence they relied on things like group chanting, direct prayer, silent meditation, staring into fires – and so on. In the modern world, we have digital streaming platforms with all the world’s music at our fingertips, we have websites that will interpret the meanings of our dreams, and we have social media platforms that will connect us to healers and teachers from all over the world to help us understand and find release from the unique conditioning of our psyche. Breaking character is more of an art now than it ever has been: we should make use of this, and not insist on ancient methods for timeless concerns. ::

5 :: The spiritual path – the art of breaking character – is hard. But so is regular life. At least on the spiritual path we are actively increasing our capacity to be with difficulty. It is also precisely what we are designed to do – the exact kind of difficulty we are built for. ::

6 :: You will be routinely misperceived if you pursue the art of breaking character. This is far better than routinely misperceiving yourself – and everyone around you. ::

7 :: We will make little progress in the art of breaking character if we are not willing to accept that we have been completely wrong about many things that we considered to be blindingly obvious our entire lives. This is a minimum requirement. ::

8 :: Once we see a little into our predicament, it dawns on us that life is a lucid dream. We are ensnared in a drama of our own making and which we can only transcend by seeking the resolution to the story of “me”, or seeing with utmost clarity that it is but a story. Ultimately we shall have to do both to be truly free and unconditioned by this dream. ::

9 :: We do not realise how much love we crucify to construct our personality. We do not know how much there is to reclaim when we learn to break character. ::

10 :: You will find that if you prioritise the art of breaking character, everything else in your life will begin working out too. It may take a minute, but everything will slowly start whirring into coherence if you make internal sanity a priority. ::