Psychology of Awakening

DIANA PAULA REVECHE ANGEL ROSE TROCIO

Is PERSONALITY

a flaw or a path
to spiritual unfolding?

Personality as a path rather than pathology

PATHOLOGY
pathology (p -th l -j ). n. pl. pathologies. 1. The scientific study of the nature of disease and its causes, processes, development, and consequences.

A way or track laid

down for walking or made by continual treading.

Path

THERAPEUTIC AGRESSION

Trying to bring about transformation though waging an assault of conditioned personality

HOW DOES IT AFFECT YOU AS A PERSON?

It attacks the personality to rob people of the basic material they need for their journey of awakening

HOW DOES IT AFFECT YOU AS A PERSON?

It implies a basic message that you would be a better person if you were someone different from the one you truly are

HOW DOES IT AFFECT YOU AS A PERSON?

It makes coercive attempts to dismantle the personality only to heighten division, conflict and strain to ego

When is personality a path than pathology?

when we learn to work with ourselves as we are, without aggression or blame

When is personality a path than pathology?

We must create conditions that encourage the personality structure to break open from within, revealing essential qualities of our being that are hidden within.

When is personality a path than pathology?

When you clean your teapot, then the teapot wakes you up. Chogyam Trungpa
(When you work on your personality structure, your personality wakes you up.)

IDENTITY FORMATION

Three Marks of Existence

1. The difficult realities of pain
2. Impermanence 3. Lack of solid, definite sense of who we are

But since our life is marked by fear of potential nonexistence, we give rise to.

IDENTITY PROJECT
a. the attempt to make ourselves something solid, substantial and real into

b. a way counter the threat of nonexistence; usually made possible through building self images and stories that identify who they are c. the desire to overcome our fear of being deficient, to know ourselves, to value others, and to feel that we are real

COEMERGENCE

 Awakened mind and the confused mind

as two sides of the same reality are said to co-emerge

(Example: neurosis-sanity, imprisonment-freedom, existence-nonexistence, pathology-path)

Defensive strategies used as advantages

IDENTITY CRISIS AND EXISTENTIAL CHOICE

IDENTITY CRISIS

Marks the beginning of a path of unlocking the intelligence, sanity and the other powerful inner resources that we have been locked up in our conditioned personality

Three main existential choices

Pathological Choice 1: Remain stagnant in your

current post and not to risk moving forward into the unknown and uncertain because our old identity has outlived its usefulness Pathological Choice 2: Attack or punish ourselves for the personality we have become, or to strive with all our might to live up to an ideal of who we should be The choice to Path: Opening ourselves to our experience and facing and working with ourselves as we are, instead of aggressively trying to make ourselves into something different

Working ourselves as we are

The first step in turning personality into path is developing a commitment to seeing ourselves as we are, no matter what well discover.

Awareness practice
(eg. Meditation, inner contemplative inquiry) helps develop the capacity to witness what we are doing without becoming caught up in judging it as good or bad.

TRANSMUTING NEUROSIS

 If we blame ourselves for our personality

patterns, we cannot access the gift contained within them and thus only impoverish ourselves further.
Whatever problem, question, or confusion

we have, whatever seems impossible in our lives becomes our path

Ego as Grasping
Ego is a structure built on self-representations

Western psychology
Ego is an activity, a recurring tendency to make

oneself into something solid and defined. Buddhist psychology

Dak-Dzin a Tibetan term often translated to as ego

is grasping at self or holding on to the I I think myself to be.

A Buddhist View of Ego Development

Skandhas five layered tendencies at work operating within and shaping our experience of reality.

 The five layers of skandha: Me or form It is the birth of ignorance. Correspond to the

stage when the child identifies with the body: I am this body. Feeling Feeling out situations to see if they are for us or against us. Perception or impulse involves adopting a stance (of passion, aggression or ignorance) toward situations. Conceptualization We generate elaborate beliefs and interpretations about reality based on our patterns of hope and fear. The ongoing stream of consciousness where all the first four skandhas come to fruition.

Ego and Egolessness

Ego awareness in a contracted state Egolessness It is awareness in a relaxed state. Ego is dying and being reborn at every moment. We continually have to let

go of what we have already thought, accomplished, known, experienced and become. nothing solid and is continually threatened by the process of dissolving.

Existential anxiety sense of impending death, a realization that I is

Egolessness is awareness that allows us to face and accept death in all its

forms.

Narcissism is inherent in the ego, but the development of the ego involves a

departure from primal narcissism. Freud