The book-in-progress The Art of Breaking Character (Volume I) contains writings on over a hundred different topics related to the path of awakening, healing or wholeness. Each of these begins with an Essential Lesson on the given topic. Here is a selection of five key concepts from the book and their Essential Lesson.
I. Breaking Character – Essential Lesson: All religions, spiritual traditions, and schools of psychotherapy teach us how to shed the limitations imposed on us from the inside of our own minds that keep us chained to confusion, dissatisfaction, suffering, disharmony, and disconnection from Reality itself. Whilst they may describe this in many different ways, they speak of a single, universal process of conscious evolution and expansion that involves the healing and resolving of all trauma, and the gradual awakening of all dormant parts, capacities and insights to unlock the ‘True Self’, ‘Deep Self’, ‘True Nature’, ‘Higher Self’, or ‘Divine Self’. Breaking character is therefore the universal process of forgetting who we think we are so as to remember who we actually are.
II. The Character – Essential Lesson: We become who we need to become to survive the uniquely challenging circumstances of each of our early lives. We learn what to fear, shame, trust, believe and identify with based on what will get our needs met – for love, safety, acceptance, witnessing, belonging. We shut away vast portions of our potential in order to remain safe, and yet when our environment changes – when we leave home, meet new people, or travel across the globe – we remain stuck in this ‘false self’ that obscures the deeper diversity, beauty and virtue now dormant within us. Now we are dysfunctional. Now we may find ourselves anxious, self-conscious, pessimistic, wound tight—haunted by strange fears and reliant on distorted rituals meant to recover the self-worth that once slipped through our fingers in childhood. In spite of all this we never seem to stop clinging to and defending this version of ourselves that we don’t even need to be any more, because we have been wired by life to believe this structure of confusion and resistance is the precise thing keeping us safe. On the surface we may be pessimistic and imagine this to be the real, finished picture of us. But our optimism, as quiet as it may seem, always runs deeper. For at a deeper level, something in us knows that we are merely stuck inside a psychological prison that we built from the inside, and which we can therefore escape from. We are playing a character, and a character is always significantly more limited than the person playing it.
III. The Taste (for breaking character) – Essential Lesson: at a certain point, the process of breaking character reaches a kind of escape velocity, where the ongoing rewards of the process are so obvious, and the future rewards so tantalising, that the process begins to be self-motivating. We see that in shedding the character and all its false beliefs and distorted behaviours, we automatically and reliable become kinder, wiser, saner, calmer, better able to love and receive love, less judgemental, less resistant to everything life may throw at us and yet paradoxically more capable of changing the world around us in the image of our deeper values. We may have spent most of our lives resisting this rediscovery of our potential – for fear of all the pain we might have to face in doing so. Now we have acquired The Taste (for Breaking Character), and feel firmly on the path to our deeper destiny – and this pain can begin fading into insignificance.
IV. The Totality of the Self – Essential Lesson: Being made of the same essential stuff or substance — energy that shifts endlessly between forms — our psyches share a universal potential for every emotion (fear, anger, grief, joy, love) and for every quality born from them or distorted by them (kindness, cruelty, humility, power-lust, compassion, deceit). Not all of these will surface in a single lifetime, but any of them can, given the right conditions. The long journey of breaking character demands that we recognise and accept this full spectrum within ourselves — the Totality of the Self.
V. Repression – Essential Lesson: The mind automatically and unconsciously pushes down emotions, traits, and other parts of ourselves to avoid overwhelm and survive the challenges we face. Much of this happens in childhood, when we are wide open, highly sensitive, and more of our potential is visible and vulnerable to the pressures of the world. Yet at any challenging moment in life, we can repress into the unconscious what we cannot yet bear to face. Repression is entirely reversible, but until we recognize its effects, it will continue to keep hidden everything in us that we secretly long to reclaim.
Disagree? Tell me. 🙂
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Love
R
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