Inner Personality Theory
The house is large enough for everyone, if they know how to live in it. Whether a house, a body, a planet, or a galaxy, togetherness is something for which there is always enough: enough food, enough water and air, enough love, enough energy and resources… But togetherness takes restraint, listening, and flexibility. One must act, express, influence, contribute, teach, live freely and completely, receive from others, and know how to take. One must also take breaks and take space, retreat, listen, learn, allow, compromise, tolerate, appreciate, and live moderately without waste.
Nature never wastes. In the wilderness this is accomplished by any means necessary, and often through territorial brutality and survival tactics. However, once a species moves into a higher, more aware stage of sociocultural evolution, the need to not waste becomes more dire and more complex. Rather than brutality, a civilization must cultivate community, art, and specialization. In theory, politics should also be considered, though to work correctly it takes a sufficient degree of foundational community, art, and specialization. Governance requires that a population experiences genuine, intrinsic solidarity, so that it can be guided and cultivated without the need to coerce and destroy.
Within the physical body there are also organs and systems that require governance in a similar way. The smaller the house, the less margin for error and the greater the degree of interconnectedness. A planetary ecosystem is robust and resilient. A government can make mistakes and suffer fools. A physical body, however, must be much more careful. Everything has its breaking point of course, but the wellness of the body cannot afford the margin of error larger systems accommodate in stride.
This is true not only for physical but also emotional, mental, and transpersonal systems as well. Physical organs, blood, and cellular regeneration live independently with the nervous system’s ability to individuate its emotions, memories, and desires. A third, “invisible” system is also entangled with these two traditional ideas of body and mind. It would be a grave mistake to call the third system “spiritual” or “religious”, or to pretend like it doesn’t exist—conflating it with the mechanics of the body or the hallucinations of the mind. If the transpersonal blood and bone of the body is not considered fairly and scientifically, it leads immediately to individual and social illness, and for large species eventually to a margin of error capable of toppling nations and poisoning planets.
The third, transpersonal system that is both abstract and also immanent to the health and capacity of the physical body must be approached cautiously. It has been explored by many different names, methodologies, and paradigms. It can be talked about shamanistically as the liminal dreambody, psychologically as the transpersonal somatic axis, spiritually as the continuum of energetic membranes described by the Vedic koshas, etc. Certainly these approaches are all valid and important facets of a complex truth that, like a cut gem, has many facets.
However, often difficulty in realizing holistic models for health and human potential boil down, not to a lack of data or applicable knowledge, but to a fundamental stubbornness to commit to a cosmology in which extradimensional quanta and transpersonal qualia bear equivalency. Objectivity and subjectivity are ultimately interconnected and unified varieties of phenomena. The body, mind, and third, hidden system compose a degree of complexity that deserves a sober and unique form of research methodology.
Modern science has illuminated many fascinating things about neurology, cellular and molecular anatomy, and the uncertain, probabilistic universe of quantum physics. Spiritual and shamanistic methodologies have meanwhile cultivated ideas about an animistic cosmos with plutonic ideals and living esoteric laws, which behave both as physical architecture and an ecosystem of godlike spirits or overlapping forces complete with agency and purpose. It is a great shame that the hyperspace described by noneuclidian geometry and the astral planes, lokas, and dream territories described by lucid out of body experiences are not researched by a single discipline.
There are strange and wonderful faculties, mechanics, and possibilities of the universe, and the physical body, that science and spirituality have yet to fully grasp. More specifically, there is a critical and radical aspect of the body’s composition that remains taboo. Along with physical and cognitive systems, (and many interpenetrating, overlapping, local and nonlocal collective systems we must also consider!), there is a third personality system that remains undisclosed.
The personality system is one alluded to by psychological “parts work”; the shamistic recalling or retrieval of a multifaceted “soul” (Evenki, Quechua, Otomi/Toltec, Nguni, etc.); Traditional Chinese Medicine and Taoism's consideration for the emotional life of organs and body systems; and even in far older and less understood paradigms of the self or “soul,” as found in the ancient Egyptian’s ritual respect for the spiritual life of the physical organs. These traditions speak to a need for further standardization and more accurate modeling but also to the validity and immediacy of its importance. Furthermore, many of these traditions have been polluted and bottlenecked by well-meaning academic anthropologists, religious followers, and dabbling translators.
But why is the personality system critical, radical, and difficult to grasp? It is a unifying system which bridges subjectivity and objectivity, individualism and collectivism, and physical and transpersonal cognition. Because it unifies these facets of reality within the physical body, it is an extremely influential and potent part of who and what we are. Because it fundamentally challenges any worldview or cosmology predicated on ideas of causation, duality, and linear dynamics. For people conditioned and oriented to this way of being, many aspects of their own health and identity will remain mysterious, unconscious, unintuitive, and likely even adversarial.
Inner Personality Theory begins by asking one to take a monumental leap, attributing transpersonal significance to the body’s physical organs, the mind’s cognitive faculties, and the ego’s origin point. In short, most of the physical organs and systems of the body are inhabited and co-administered by singular intelligences that we ordinarily call personalities, egos, or incarnations. On a physical level, these personalities rotate through the two-hemisphere brain and nervous system, constantly and dynamically exchanging with each other through behaviors, choices, doubts, perceptions, dreams, and even through hidden relationship dynamics and communal factions. These relationships also adhere to and constellate with social circumstances, formative family experiences, and one’s ideological beliefs and conditioning.
In this system, one’s coherent and continuous sense of self is valid but also undermined by a different way of understanding memory, time, and physical incarnation. This system is predicated on the idea that memory is a fundamental and nonlocal aspect of the cosmos. Consciousness is shared and never owned. What constitutes living systems, species, and individual organisms is closer to a transpersonal memory complex, or collective memory complex, rather than an individual cognitive complex. Therefore, parts of this complex will live within a linear, individual sense of time, while other parts will live extended across other dimensions of atemporality and plurality.
Physical species that incarnate over extended periods of time will cultivate a truly magnificent and complex nonlocal reservoir of personalities, shared archetypes, and evolutionary competencies. Furthermore, there is a kind of immortality but also continuous renewal involved in a collective consciousness system which constantly harmonizes with its memories both within and beyond time. Reincarnation is less the idea of individual personalities reincarnating through a series of linear, evolutionary pathways, and more the idea of countless personality complexes moving through fourth dimensional hyperspace in search of evolutionary opportunity and personal-collective fulfillment.
Nothing is wasted and nobody is ever alone. There is a wealth of inheritance in every organ for every person—which may also include trauma, hidden talents, and asynchronous philosophy. Of course, at this point it becomes important to stress that this is an oversimplification of a really complex vision, in which larger transpersonal and transobjective ecosystems/mechanics must be accounted for. Many things that have been discovered and are yet to be discovered by modern science, ancient spirituality, and the ordinary experiences of everyday people must be combined, synthesized, and distilled in order to properly understand what we are, how we are happening, and who is emerging in our body, on our planet, and in other dimensions beyond time and recollection.
Fortunately, the house is large enough for everyone… if they know how to live in it! According to Personality Theory, we are atemporal, emergent psycho-social-somatic entities capable of unique and precious kinds of perception, creativity, and love. When we dream of our family and friends and colleagues at night, we should not be so easily convinced by these facades, and should instead realize these faces and behaviors in conjunction with our “inner parts”, our physical organ health, and our daily personality cycles. We should never dismiss the possibility of finding “pieces” of ourselves in other people, other cultures, across history, even in those we despise or utterly reject. Therefore, we cannot afford to reject each other, suppress parts of our body or personality, or dismiss any attribute of our species in any era or epoch of civilization. We should not even be so entirely sure that parts of our inner ecosystem are incompatible with other species, nonphysical entities, or cosmological functions ordinarily treated as abiotic and inanimate.
There is more living and participating in our “unconscious” that we could ever imagine. Inner Personality theory turns the universe insideout and upsidedown. What is “inside” is absolutely everything around and beyond us. What we can find inside of our body and sense of self, meanwhile, is a gateway to a transpersonal memory complex with inconceivable possibilities and potentially unlimited interconnection. It is a theory which defines togetherness as an aspiration we can contemplate as a species endlessly and inexhaustibly. If we can understand and validate the lives of our own inner personalities, we will also be better able to guide our collective evolution and safeguard our history. We can create more space for ourselves in the universe, while also finding new ways of studying and appreciating what it truly means to be alive: To be just one part of a shared body, a shared mind, a precious and irreplaceable part of everyone and everything.