People are fascinated with personality through assessments and tests, codes, types, definitions. Personality is defined as the qualities that form a distinctive character.
Your Enneagram number, your Myers-Briggs type indicator, your Attachment Type, your Love Language. I encountered many of these assessments in graduate school for Behavioral Science.
I often hear myself say to others that I am introverted by nature. I come out so extreme on this scale when taking some of the tests that it looks like I’m a recluse with very little interest in other people.
People exclaim “That can’t be true! You seem so extraverted!” (I love Henny Youngman’s quote: You have a nice personality, but not for a human being. Ha!)
In a wonderful way, these tests assist us to use language and words to say to someone “this is what I am like”. They create connection. Some context for discovering differences. There can be a shared fun of surprise, interest, curiosity.
These kinds of assessments can help people relate or understand one another. To communicate more authentically, honestly. They often help people feel more accepting of their loved ones. People share what they learn, what drew them to answer certain ways if they are taking a test or reviewing a series of Personality Types.
In the end, though, or should I say “from the very beginning”, there is all gray area. People shift and change. They are one way with one person, another way with someone else. They have tendencies but the pattern is never truly linear, consistent.
One really interesting thing to note about any personality assessment, any statement of How We Are, any answer to tests or questions, is that they are based only on the past. On the mind finding proof of moments, feelings, ways of behavior that “show” us that we were THAT way at one time. Before.
These assessments and tests are all about “me” in the world. However, I think why people are so drawn to them is that they put us into the Observing Mind.
When we are just sitting, observing, looking, remembering….we are not reacting as much. We are fairly neutral. There is less right and wrong. We’re summarizing, making notes, like scientists.
It’s like when we do The Work and start writing down our most painful thoughts, the ideas and beliefs coming out of our minds, getting them on paper. We’re not right in the middle of expressing our thoughts, reacting to them….we’re not in the middle of acting out our personalities.
What is REALLY interesting is when we begin to see beyond these categorizations…to ask “who am I?”
What is this “I” that appears to be so present, that is living out this life, concerned with itself, having its tendencies in certain directions, with its particular personality, apparently?
Not once, but two times, Adyashanti suggested to me directly, as he also does in his writings, to think about who “I” am.
Is it bigger than a bread box? Is it an energy ball? Is it a cluster of “thinking” or “feeling”? Is it this pattern of Introverted responses, that number 4 on the Enneagram, the zodiac sign Aquarius?
Adya said to me, when I started to have frustration about how to answer the question of who or what I am…“Quick! If you had to answer RIGHT NOW, who or what do you think you are?”
In a flash I saw a huge, wide, vast open space, like sky. Nothing there.
Rats.
It can be a little discouraging to realize that your story of yourself means nothing, is nothing, doesn’t actually matter. But then, it’s only discouraging if in that split second AFTER you see who or what you are, you find another thought that is afraid of what it sees.
If whatever is here is just running, living, and there is no clear “I” then there’s nothing real to test an actual personality for. This is terrible, chaotic, discouraging, meaningless, depressing, hopeless….is that true?
“The me I know myself as, my personality, is toast…….We do not want to see that there is a gaping void at the center of our existence.”~ Adyashanti
I love the conversations and connections I’ve made by talking about test results or “my” answers. But really, in this journey which seems to be happening of being alive…I have no idea how to describe this thing called ME. Do you?
Maybe that’s OK. More than OK.
Love, Grace