Person or character

Are we people or puppets?

We can seldom choose to be people or characters; we can seldom use the characters for our purposes.

Identification makes us “lose our memory”, it makes us forget who we are, it makes us forget that the character is not us!

It ends up it is an identification that makes us move, as if we were puppets. It is mechanical: we repeat and repeat the same experience, and react in the same way in every situation. Have we become puppets?

Here are some examples:

• A dramatic character will end up being sick or failing.

• A seductress will maintain seductive attitudes even at 80, appearing ridiculous and old-fashioned.
• If a woman plays amazon, she will establish sad relationships of conflict with her partners.
• The straight-up man represses sadness, sweetness, and compassion, and falls into despair.

We have chosen the character we play among many to get a power that seems to us not only pleasant but also reassuring.

Once it’s stabilized, it’s hard to let it go or give it less importance.

Person or character? How to stop being a character.

We cannot approach many situations properly because they make us afraid.

Furthermore, our character awakes in us emotions of anger, disappointment, and dissatisfaction.

Many things in our lives we no longer like don’t work, and we don’t want them anymore. We understand that, but understanding is not enough to change anything.

We cannot decide by will whether we want to be people or characters.

• You can’t “eliminate” any emotion just because one morning you decide it is enough, and you want to stop it.
• You don’t solve a situation by despising and fighting it because you think it’s annoying.
• It doesn’t pay to get angry at yourself because you can’t repress some emotion or avoid some situation.

Self-acceptance

The only way to “get over it” is to detect it through an “inner search” and integrate it.

How can we integrate an emotion that is within us?

The first step is self-acceptance, acceptance of all our parts, physical and emotional, with their needs and their characteristics.

Self-acceptance means to listen to the inner child who screams and kicks. It means to let the child express dissatisfaction, anger, or fear, and wait until the emotion calms down.

The important thing in all this is not to add more wood to the fire.

How to remove energy from the mechanism.

We give energy to the character out of ignorance and habit.

It is possible to fill ignorance with observation and understanding. We can’t, though, change habit with a few moments of observation. We should keep in mind that we have created a mechanism of thoughts and emotions that feeds our character. To deactivate a mechanism requires time.

If you require time to deactivate it, you can avoid feeding it.

The mechanism remains there, like all our emotional forces, but if we don’t give it our attention, our identification, it remains inactive.

How to detect characters

We are the ones who must manage the character, and not our emotional forces! To choose to be people or characters, we must recognize characters. When we recognize them, we can disconnect from them, but it doesn’t happen by will.

If we want to get free from the emotional forces that control us, we should listen to them, learn to know them — through observation — and then withdraw attention from them. We need to know how to withdraw interest if we want them not to interfere with our choices.

If you want to “eliminate” them, you create a state of animosity and struggle that feeds them and makes them your enemy.

It’s an enemy that always wins!