Who am I?

• Body and Mind
• My View of Human Nature
• How others see Human Nature
• Consciousness Beyond the Brain
• Personality
• Authenticity – Being Consistent with who I am
• Interactive Enneagram
• Science, Religion and fact

How we look at ourselves can be confusing and complex. Federick Nietzsche once said in Untimely Meditations : “How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times 70 skins and still not be able to say: ‘
“This is really you, this is no longer an outer shell.””

Here are some ways we can view ourselves:

• Extroversion vs Introversion—where I get energy.
• Sensing perception vs intuitive perception—how I get data.
• Thinking judgment vs Feeling judgment—how I make decisions about data.
• Judging vs Perceiving—what I show to the world.

“Various selves make up our composite Self. There are constant and often shock-like transitions between these selves… It takes, indeed, a healthy personality for the ‘I’ to be able to speak out of all these conditions in such a way that at any moment it can testify to a reasonably coherent Self.”
Erik Erikson

Many people find that knowing their personality type provides a way of understanding their spiritual path and development: their natural gifts as well as potential blind spots. People of different types are drawn to various spiritual practices and have various ways of expressing their understanding of spirituality.

Those who prefer Introversion, for example, might be more drawn to solitary or reflective practices, while those who prefer Extraversion might be more drawn to group or active spiritual practices.

Knowing your personality can also be helpful in Education, Workplace, counseling, relationships, and finding your bliss. Here is one way of looking at personality: the ‘big 5’

Researchers took thousands of surveys about the words people used to describe themselves and others, applied factor analysis, and came up with five big themes the traits clustered around, according to Christopher Soto, a psychology professor at Colby College. (Some researchers use a similarly derived model that adds a sixth trait: honesty-humility.)

The idea behind these 5 types is that everyone’s personality has a little of all five trait groups. What the test does, essentially, is tell you where you fall on the spectrum of each of the clusters.

How do you see yourself?

You may, like physicist Otto Frisch, be of the view that thinking about yourself is only relevant for the present moment: ‘I have always lived very much in the present, remembering only what seemed to be worth retelling’ & ‘I have always, as I already said, lived in the here and now, and seen little of the wider views.’

“I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another.
But which is the real one? All of them or none?”
W Somerset Maugham

Or you may feel like John Updike,  ‘I have the persistent sensation, in my life…, that I am just beginning’.