I have come across a series of books influenced by Carl Jung and it has me looking differently at personality and who we are.
Carl Jung adopted the notion that there are layers to our personality. Perhaps if you asked him the question ‘Who Are You?’ he would have responded that we are complicated and have layers, like an onion.
The first layer is the public persona that represents all of the material things associated with us such as our titles, our possessions, our associations, and our accomplishments. This stuff is always being accumulated or lost or moved around. Its the crassest level of who ‘you’ are.
The layer below that is the private persona that is the collection of physical, sociological, psychological, and metaphysical elements that create your time/space perspective. This layer guides your way of interacting with the world, but is also dynamically changing. Its the personality level of who ‘you’ are.
But there is also the level below known as the psyche level which is even more fluid and subtle. At this layer of who ‘you’ are we would find feelings, emotions, intuitions, reactions that you experience but generally cannot articulate. It is all very gut-level feeling. At this level it becomes possible for an intuitive connection to what we really are and realize our interconnectedness with others. At this level, we can connect to the ‘Collective Unconsciousness’ through dreams and archetypes.
I believe that at these lowest layers we eventually arrive at the revelation that other beings are more important that you.
The ‘you’ then takes on a relevancy only because it is the only tool you can directly work with. As much as everyone else is more important, you can only demonstrate this through the actions you take. The ‘YOU’ becomes a tool and instead of being a term, it now becomes an acronym. Y-O-U can now stand for:
Y – Yielding
O – Openness
U – Understanding
Being ‘Y-O-U’ is not just about owning wealth, status, personality, dreams, or a heritage. Being ‘Y-O-U’ is also about radical transformation to be more yielding, more open, and more understanding.
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