Page 9 - GOODONE

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in a state of flux. Your personality then gets taken over by the resistance

to change. Much of what you come to regard as your identity – your ‘self’
with a small ‘S’ - has really evolved its present form as a result of this

resistance. In a sense, the personality is the resistance! It represents a
false, disempowered, dysfunctional self, that serves to prevent you from

becoming aware of the true nature of the people that you meet; from
accurately assessing the situations in which you find yourself; and from
being able to express yourself authentically. When your personality acts

as a shield against change, your perception of the world becomes
distorted by the conflict between your instinctive requirements and your

past experience. Literally, you picture the world to fit with your apparent
needs. Some of these needs are relevant to the present moment, but

others are echoes of past events, clouding the real picture and creating
the distortion. The presenting scene becomes partially replaced by these

distorted fixed pictures, which can be described as ‘unfinished business’,
which need to be examined and understood in order to enable true self-
awareness.

Most if not all, stress coping and dependency problems, come under
this heading. It's the personal resistance to change that, over the years,
largely moulds the individual’s false sense of ‘self’, that is, the Ego.

Before the experience of true awareness can be achieved, personal
unfinished business needs to be brought to completion, in order to free

the energy bound up in maintaining resistant attitudes for creative work
in the present day world. You'll never be able to see what's really going

on around you right now, as long as your fixed attitudes and patterns of
behaviour remain stuck in the past, with your eyes permanently focused

on an unchanging inner landscape.

In the process of becoming personally aware, you will continually need
to examine your own fixed attitudes and discover their true function.

Your work is to bring them up to date - to make them relevant to the
present, instead of remaining anachronistic throwbacks to a long-gone
era. The ultimate aim is to establish genuine, authentic, one-to-one