Can you consciously live with persona and not get tricked into the delusion of identifying with that persona? Seems like it might be a very slippery slope. How easily that persona can encourage a false belief about who you are. Tabula rasa? How would we relate to one another if we did not operate through persona, through a self-constructed self-image? How would we group up with others? Pair up? Who would we choose as friends, or partners? What if we were walking blank slates interacting spontaneously.
I’m not talking about the possibility of walking around without the influence of past experiences and memory. This is beside the point. I am talking about the insight that who I think I am in any given moment is a complete fabrication. And, I am talking about the insight into the mechanism of how that belief works; or, perhaps even better, how it feels. When you can intuitively sense out how that belief is operating, you can begin to ease away from its power to entrance you.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the choice to embody a specific kind of persona seems to allow for (or, even limit you to) specific kinds of social interactions and social opportunities. Perhaps the very act of embodying a specific persona activates a respective cognitive filter for how we see the world. For instance, if I am embodying my “spiritual” persona, perhaps it is more likely that I will see other spiritual people, perhaps a spiritual book in Macondo store front window will catch my eye, and perhaps I am less likely to want to engage deeply with others in the community who are not on that wavelength. Similarly, if I am wearing my “music-lover/musician” hat, perhaps I will be more able to notice, and more willing to engage with, all those folks I know who are into music, and maybe the music theory book will catch my eye. Perhaps a persona encourages a kind of “tunnel vision”, and lack of openness.
But, I am also curious about how others are able to relate to us, based on the kind of persona we choose to embody. It seems like some people find a persona, and really stick to it. It seems convenient. I haven’t been able to do it since I see them all as bullshit. How is a fabrication real? What I really am must be underneath this persona – can I call it the Absolute? The Absolute transcends* persona (*what a misleadingly profound word). But, those words are near (if not entirely) meaningless.
Personae are garments we wear. Perhaps you wear the same thing everyday. Perhaps you go home every three hours to change your outfit. I guess what I am partly pointing at is that there is a silent nakedness hidden beneath these robes. And, I wonder what it would be like if we met each other in this nakedness. Would we have qualms over our different opinions and beliefs, or our orientations to our world(s)? What is authentic connection, anyway? Does that exist? Or, is it just that: when I like your persona, and you like mine, we hang out because we like our collective persona. Or, is there a connection that is deeper than that? Can we connect in this nakedness? Yes. We can.
I have a friend who I met at a Gangaji retreat in the late summer of 2011. During a recent conversation with him, he asked me if I thought we would have connected had we not been able to understand each other so well spiritually. He asked me this because in most ways, the things we gravitated towards growing up, hobbies, interests, the personae we adopted, were/are so different. I told him, no, we probably wouldn’t have connected. We don’t connect now because our persona’s line up well (okay, maybe our spiritual personae do), but because we can meet each other in this silent nakedness of the soul, in authenticity. We are incredibly revealing to one another, and its fucking amazing. Could this have happened had we not been in an environment together were persona was irrelevant? I don’t think so. What if more social interactions were like that? What a DREAM!
What if we let go of our clinging to our beliefs and opinions?
Have fun shedding the garments. Even if just for a moment. Stand in your nakedness in the mirror of Truth.
P.S. My next post is likely going to a huge rant on authenticity, and the lack of it in our culture, even in those places and people claiming to be “spiritual” (what the fuck does that mean, anyway?)
musingsofamanremembering 