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Who is the real you?

by Carissa Conti
© November 2, 2007

 
Do you think you know who you are?

Spiritual seekers have contemplated that they’re not their outer shell, realizing that they are spirit/energy incarnated in the physical form. Many take it a step further, acknowledging past lives, knowing they’ve been here before in other forms, and will continue to exist after their current body has expired.

But we can still forget and get caught up in our external selves and what we perceive to be “us,” known as our personality. Our likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests, music, food and clothing preferences, gender, skin, hair and body type. In this piece I go through the various influences on our personality, things that some people may not have even considered, and try to get to the bottom of what’s left after you strip away all the tacked on exterior influences. What makes us “us”? Is there even an “us” underneath all the outer influences? If so, how is it determined? And what in the frickity frack does it all mean anyway when the things you thought were “you” turn out to not be? !!

 
Personality influences

Astrology. I began researching astrology at age 15 in the most basic way with regards to sun signs matching up to people’s personalities. It’s one thing to read a description of somebody’s sun sign and say after the fact that it matches them…it’s another thing entirely to be able to guess what people’s sun signs are – even their moon signs – before they tell you. That proved to me that there was validity to the concept of energetic influences shaping people’s personalities depending on what time of the year they were born. I never studied up on astrology beyond where the sun, moon and other planetary bodies are in people’s charts and what their rising signs are, so I’m completely clueless when it comes to chart casting and stuff involving “nodes” and “trines” and “opposing” and “square” and other fancy astro terms. ;) But I have paid attention to the signs of anybody who’s ever been close to me in life, looking for patterns, looking to see if stuff really matches up. And from what I can say, it definitely does.

One example would be a coworker I had back in ’97 named Theresa at this one office temp job. I first guessed her to be Cancer, but the more I observed of her personality I realized there seemed to be some Aries going on as well. My final conclusion was Cancer sun, Aries moon. Theresa would later mention her birthday, sometime in July, making her a Cancer sun sure enough, but I went and looked up her full birthday in a Sun Sign/Moon Sign book and discovered…she had an Aries moon. ! It was a “holy shit!” moment for me indeed, proving validity to astrological influences. She’s not the only one I’ve been able to guess though, there have been many, although none to that level of guessing both sun and moon. ! So something is up with astrology for sure. And for myself, I’ve had three people offhand who wanted to try to guess what I was. The first, a male bartender in SoCal, guessed me to be a Scorpio back when I was 20. The second, when I was 21, was another male bartender in SoCal (bartenders are usually excellent people observers…) and he guessed me to be a Virgo. The third, when I was 29, was from a female coworker in Florida who could have sworn I’d be a Leo based on my friendly, helpful and energetic personality with her. So who was right?

Technically, all of them were. I’m a Scorpio sun, Virgo moon, with Leo rising. !

Then recently there was a coworker that I’ll call “Sharon,” at a temp job that I was at for a year. Before starting that particular temp job I’d had the offhand thought that I REALLY wanted to meet somebody in life who had my exact birthday. November 9, 1974. Just so I could do a personality comparison, see how alike we’d be. Well, for months I was working at this particular temp job and never realized that my coworker sitting 20 feet away from me was born November 9, 1974. In New York, same as me. Only 50 miles from where I was born. !! It couldn’t have been a more perfect and identical set up. Two females born on the same day, in the same geographic region. It was stunning to say the least when we both finally found out. In fact the coworkers around us got completely silent, like, huh….that’s uh, weird. I’ve never met anybody with my exact birthday, and I probably never will again. The funny part is, out of everybody there “Sharon” had intrigued me the most in terms of trying to figure out what her sign was. Something about her was just annoying and obnoxious to me, and she was one of two people that I least liked in the office, and one of two females in the office that I’d least be socializing within in any capacity. :D Very funny in retrospect. Also, I had guessed her to be a Leo…which may actually be accurate, depending on what time of the day she was born – she may also be Leo rising, like me. I never found out the time she was born to confirm that, unfortunately, although I can make a tentative conclusion that she was.

On the surface we didn’t seem anything alike – “Sharon” was extroverted, talked loud with an aggressive bossy energy, gave half-assed sloppy instruction and didn’t pay attention to details. Her job as a customer service rep for this financial investment company answering energy draining non-stop pesky questions from investor members was something I’d never do in a million years and could never tolerate. She wasn’t interested in learning about her coworkers for the most part, with the exception of her colleague Mike since they worked so closely together; she kept her emotional distance with everybody else, only engaging people on a superficial surface level, and didn’t seem to partake in observant “people watching.” She also didn’t display any humor. She could be in good humor…but she was never humorous, definitely not the sort that was able to make people laugh. She was college educated and now married with two kids, drove a minivan and owned a house in a prestigious neighborhood and was close with her family, always on the phone with her mom and sisters, or having her family visit her in the office. And should anybody in the office show up with a new baby, Sharon had to be the one holding it for like twenty minutes to a half an hour straight and be the center of attention with the baby, always the expert know-it-all when it came to all stuff “mom” because she had two kids herself, bonding with the new moms over diaper pail recommendations, baby carrier seats and the best places to shop for kids clothes. yaaaaaaaawwn. Totally mainstream and boring.

I on the other hand was low key, observant and analytical, as well as very organized with everything I did at work. I closely watched and listened to everything my coworkers did and said, keeping mental notes. With those I did become buddies with there was always my wry wit going on, making people laugh. I couldn’t stomach college and will never go back, I don’t have kids and don’t plan to, I have a long term boyfriend but never plan to get married, I refuse to own a home and be that ingrained in the mainstream world, forget driving a minivan ;) and I have no parents/family in my life. The parents are divorced and the family was long ago scattered to the wind. So I’m on my own as far as that goes. I’ve lived quite the nomadic existence outside the mainstream, job hopping, moving around, living out of suitcases in motels, on friends floors and in repossessed houses, you name it :D all the while with a cast of colorful characters surrounding me and embroiled in paranormal woo-woo experiences. So life has been a crazy adventurous ride for me, nothing like her life. So we’re quite obviously nothing alike I concluded, much to my brow furrowed disappointment. I’d figured that another November 9, 1974 person, especially a female from the same geographic region, would be a kindred spirit! Somebody with a life like mine! Somebody just like me! So what was this Sharon nonsense?!!? :D Yet the fact that I found her to be annoying yet intriguing shows right there that there was something about our identical birthdays that was coming through loud and clear, maybe a bit like magnets of the same polarity that repel.

Then I saw her husband for the first time when he came into the office to bring her lunch. I about fell out of my chair, as he was the spitting image of my ex boyfriend, Steve. They could have been cousins. Both were half German actually, so that was a big part of it. Near same height and build, with the same coloring and strikingly similar facial features. (Different hair though.) And both were jerky, although her guy even more so, but in different ways, and Sharon’s marriage to this Steve look-a-like was actually on the rocks as a result, as they later separated. And she seemed to be chasing her jerky, soon to be ex hubby around trying to appease him similar to the way I did with Steve at the beginning of our relationship. Also, even more bizarre is the way that her husband snidely referred to her as a “princess”…..Steve once snidely said the exact same thing about me, likening me to the “princess and the pea” fairytale, implying I was so fussy I’d feel the pea under 20 mattresses. Not true, but it’s quite an amazing coincidence indeed. So that was the first thing that made me realize…okay, wait a second here…what are the odds that both of us would have hooked up with guys that looked the same and with jerky personalities???! (Even stranger being that Steve was not at all my normal physical “type” that I go for and was an anomaly in general as far as my relationships go, as explained in my book.)

Then I noticed the way that she walked. Like me, she charged around the office in this high energy way, arms swinging and head tilted slightly up, as if she had places to go and things to do…even when she didn’t. The same exact walk as me. In fact we were the only two who walked that way. Everybody else either walked in a controlled, methodical way or trudged around with low energy. Then I had to reluctantly admit that her high energy, take charge aggressive if not bossy energy was actually a match for me…I just don’t act like that at work. But in my personal life when I’m relaxed and I’m being myself, then yeah, we’re the same in that regard, sometimes even talking the same way. And her general lack of interest in finding out about her coworkers, keeping her distance for the most part (save for forced office social events)? Actually not that far off from me once I realized. One of the main things I enjoy about being a temp is the fact that I can keep my distance and don’t have to get too involved with things. I even have a penchant for doing ballet moves – something I never formerly studied in this timeline – and one of Sharon’s hobbies used to be…ballet. ;)

So even though on the surface it seemed we were polar opposites, there were in fact underlying identical things in common once you look past the college, house, babies, close knit extended family, minivan and the job I’d never do. ;) My final conclusion is that many of the things that make me “me” and thus so different from her are merely the result of life events…things that didn’t happen to her. Otherwise who knows where I would be. I too started out as an extrovert, like her, but later became an introvert due to things that had happened in life. And with a different family and environment growing up I may have wound up completing college, living a quiet normal life in my 20s with a family looking out for me the way hers did, versus all that nomadic craziness, then settling down, having babies, and living a life like hers, with more in common than I could even imagine. (Which ties into the idea of parallel timelines, coming up later in this piece.) It was very cool though to get my request of meeting another with my exact birthday so I could compare and analyze as an experiment.

And another interesting random thing about astrology, and how sharing the same birthday may cause extreme similarities – several years ago when Justin Timberlake had his personal reimaging you could call it, with the newly shaved head and tough guy look he was always affecting on magazine covers ;) (versus his former curly haired, Mouskateer/boy band, boyfriend of Britney image) I would always pause and look at these magazine covers while in the store and think, “God…he looks SO much like my brother Joe now.” The found, shaved head with dark hair stubble, the look in the eyes, the hardened, tough expression in the face. The facial features are slightly different, and in Joe’s case, the look in his eyes and face wasn’t contrived, it was real, from things that had happened to him in life. So it also had an element of emptiness, lacking the sentience that Justin has in his pics. But there was still something there that was identical. It was just uncanny. Joe is no longer here, so for me it was kind of like seeing a ghost. Then I come to find out that Justin’s birthday is…..January 31, 1981. Same exact day Joe was born, as mentioned elsewhere on my site. That was pretty freaky deaky to discover.

On a closing note for this section, the ultimate kicker is that astrology actually no longer matches where the sky is at. A little known fact for most people. The sky has actually shifted, as it naturally does with the precession of the equinoxes, but astrology is still using the old sky configuration from 1,000+ years ago. All of which means, whatever sign you think you were born under you really weren’t. You’re really the one before it. So I’ve really been a Libra all along, not Scorpio, with Gemini rising or something, not Leo. Yet there can be no doubt that people are still holding the energy patterns of the old sky when one can accurately guess what another’s sun sign – even moon sign – are “supposed” to be. So what’s going on with that?! Why are people incarnating with the old energy patterns? I don’t know. Either it’s not actually the stars and planets creating the energetic personality influences as believed, which would be the logical, sensible conclusion, or, our reality has been hijacked in some way and we’re being locked into an artificial template of some sort that stays the same despite whatever changes the external goes through…which would be the crazy “woo-woo” conclusion of “Matrix”-level proportions. ;) Whatever the reason it’s of high interest to me, and a topic for another write up I suppose.

 
Brain injuries/amnesia/senility/Alzheimers, etc. Something that fascinated me at a young age about personality and “who we are” were the stories of what happens to people who’ve sustained brain injuries or amnesia, or who are experiencing the debilitating effects of senility/dementia or Alzheimer’s. Everything about “who they are” as people, all their accomplishments and everything they’ve spent a lifetime building can vanish in a matter of years or even overnight, as if none of it ever happened. A good example would be the 1991 movie “Regarding Henry,” starring Harrison Ford and Annette Benning, about a lawyer named Henry Turner (Ford) who has become disconnected from people and life. Henry is shot in the head during a convenience store robbery gone awry and loses his memory and motor skills, having to start over from scratch. Bit by bit he learns who he used to be…and who he used to be was apparently a bit of a jerk, he discovers. While “Regarding Henry” is a tale of fiction, brain injuries and amnesia do happen to people, sometimes leaving them with a completely altered personality just like in the movie.

What does it mean on a soul level if someone can go from being a bit of a heartless jerk to being childlike and incapacitated? Or even a decent person to a blank slate who remembers none of it? Which is the real self? Are any of them the “real” self? In cases like that, clearly the soul energy is not influencing the personality for it to be able to flip flop wildly in such polar opposite directions. The soul energy is animating the shell, but the personality of the shell itself is coming from the brain. Not the soul.

And that to me has always been a major eye opening concept.

Spiritual seekers tend to put heavy focus on the soul/spirit at the expense of giving the brain credit where credit is due, while scientists and intellectuals over emphasize the brain at the expense of the soul and the astral/etheric bodies. There ideally should be a middle ground here, and recently my interest has focused on figuring out to what extent each has its influence on “Who We Are.” (On a side note, a good book that I’ve been reading that looks at the brain is “Phantoms in the Brain” by V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D., for anybody who’s interested in finding a well written but down to earth book that talks about the workings of the brain, where you don’t need to be a neurosurgeon to understand it. ;) )

 
Genetics/Environment/upbringing/family influences. One of the most obvious influences on who we think we are as people are our families and our upbringing. Our parents pass on their genes to us, we’re physically half of them, and our families in general show us love or hate, and are our model for how to treat each other, animals and the planet, giving us their perspective on religion, work/money, race relations, sexuality, politics, world affairs, as well as influencing the language(s) we speak, the way we talk, our mannerisms, the sorts of hobbies and interests we might pursue, the types of foods we eat and the way we prepare them and how we eat them, what movies or shows we watch – or don’t watch – the books we read or don’t read.

Most people seem to absorb what they’re raised to believe and adopt their family’s entire way of being in general without really giving it all much thought, growing up to become “Mini Me’s” of their parents. It was something I was VERY conscious of myself by the time I was 18 and 19, having cut ties with my mom. I paid close attention to the way I talked and the word/phrase choices I used, my voice, my mannerisms, you name it to make sure I didn’t sound anything like her, while subconsciously doing everything in my power to live my life as polar opposite as she had…as polar opposite as either of my parents had actually, and the way I had been raised as a kid. In another article I wrote awhile go, “Working for the Puppet People…and Finding a Way Out” I had said “Everything is set up and in place before we’re born, and then we arrive on the scene and pick up where our parents left off, without missing a beat, and in turn pass this along to our own children….” For that reason I don’t think it’s a bad idea for people to be more conscious of how they may have morphed into Mini Me’s.

 
Identical twins. And speaking of genetics….recently while reading the book “The Synchronized Universe – New Science of the Paranormal” by Claude Swanson, PhD., I came across the example of two identical male twins named James who’d been raised apart, only to later discover that they’d wound up living near identical lives. There’s a cross comparison chart that shows all the ways that James and James wound up being the same as adults, which is supposed to illustrate the connection that identical twins share even when they’re separated and raised without knowing the other.

From “The Synchronized Universe” for those who are not familiar with the twin James story:

“One case involved the identical twins Jim Springer and Jim Lewis, who were reunited at age thirty nine after being separated at birth and placed in different homes in Ohio. (Jackson, 1980) Table 4.1 shows Dr. Pearsall’s description of the findings of the case, summarized in chart form. (Pearsall, 1988)

“Pearsall also notes that research has now shown that twins raised apart are more identical than twins raised together. This is probably because of the struggled of each twin to establish his individuality when living together. (Holden, 1980)

And the cross comparison chart (I left out the boring physical health things that were the same, as it makes sense that their bodies would have the same blood pressure, pulse, weight, etc. since they are genetically identical after all, and instead will focus on the amazing non-physical similarities):

Name given by adoptive parents: James James
Number of times married: 2 2
Name of first wife: Linda Linda
Name of second wife: Betty Betty
Name of one son: James Alan James Alan
Name of dog: Toy Toy
Beer preference: Miller Lite Miller Lite
Smoking habit: Chain smoked Chain smoked
Preferred cigarette brand: Salem Salem
Make of car: Chevrolet Chevrolet
Hobby: Carpentry Carpentry
Location of hobby: Basement workshop Basement workshop
Sports dislike: Baseball Baseball
Sports like: Stock car racing Stock car racing
Community service Deputy sheriff Deputy sheriff
Bad habits Severely chewed fingernails Severely chewed fingernails
Relations with wife: Affectionate, demonstrative, leaves notes around the house Affectionate, demonstrative, leaves notes around the house
Political voting over last twelve years: Voting identical Voting identical
Past, present and future oriented? Present Present
Vacations: Trips to identical beach in Florida Trips to identical beach in Florida

 
For me, reading this once again brought up the issue that’s been on my mind lately – what makes us “us” ? Here you can think that you’re so unique and that your likes, dislikes, hobbies and interests, food, clothing and music preferences and personality traits are “you” only to find out that, well…they’re not, they’re the motivations of some other inexplicable force at work that really has nothing to do with “you”! Never does this become more evident than with the study of separated twins. When two people wind up the same even though they were raised apart then it really makes you realize that none of that stuff is us.

 
Past lives. Not everybody believes in the concept of past lives, but if you were somebody who arrived on the scene as a baby and toddler with past life memories and holdovers, then it becomes difficult not to believe in it. When I was about three or four I was apparently telling my parents all about how “when I was a little boy,” probably comparing that childhood to this one it seems, among other major indicators. But it’s in my belief that we don’t just live one time, then die and either get sent to heaven or hell for the rest of eternity, the end. Rather, we’re an eternal energy that keeps going in many forms, in many realities, playing many roles. And sometimes those roles can be vastly different. Male, female, this race, that race, this language, that language, tall, short, fat, skinny, blond, brunette, rich, poor, this religion, that religion, the victimizer, the victim. And relevant for what I’m talking about in this write up, many will carry over from one life to the next the various likes and dislikes that they’ve accumulated in their various incarnations, manifesting as inexplicable affinities or prejudices towards things. Maybe you’ve read about it in books regarding people’s past life regressions, or even experienced it for yourself, but people will often be inexplicably drawn to (or averse to) certain countries, cultures, religions, foods, music, language, ways of dress, and so on, later revealed in regressions to be linked to certain past lives, whether positive or negative.

These personality holdovers compound over the incarnations, layering on and influencing each subsequent personality…but in the end they’re not us. It’s just the external baggage we’ve accumulated along the way in our travels.

I haven’t had a past life regression myself, I’ve only pieced together theories about what time periods/cultures/countries I may have lived in based on either extreme affinities or prejudices, as mentioned. But I have had a couple of very psychic people I’ve known independently confirm two of the lives I’ve suspected, as well as both saying the same thing about what the nature of those particular lives were. So that was interesting. In fact with regards to my last immediate life before this one, my psychic friend said “He’s ALL up in your grill.” ;) Meaning, the personality traits and that particular lifetime’s cultural influences are still loud and clear in the current me, which I’ve been aware of since I was a kid. (and to rule out the concept of entity attachments, I’ve had two experiences, one as a baby and one as a 20 year old, where I saw myself in that particular previous body, looking down at myself.)

What’s also interesting to me is when a past life character we’ve played is drastically different from our current selves – different gender, race, country, culture, language and so on. It’s a bit mind boggling when you think about it, how could we have been that person…and then be our current self which is so different? The whole way we can so easily slip into our new shell and occupy it as if it were the only way to be.

Recently I’ve been reading a book that my aforementioned psychic friend passed along to me called “Rebirthing – Freedom From Your Past” by Deike Begg, about the rebirthing breathing technique used to relax, open energy blockages, heal the body and rid cellular memory trauma, among other applications. Relevant for this article is how the author has walked her clients through the rebirthing breathing process only to have them spontaneously enter into various past lives, usually particularly traumatic deaths. One interesting example that stood out for me involved Leila, who’d been engaged in a long and drawn out divorce settlement battle for over six years with her ex-husband, trying to take him to the cleaners in this effort to punish him out of bitterness, meanwhile simultaneously holding a grudge against her father for his shortcomings and foibles that negatively impacted her family growing up.

“Subsequent past-life Rebirthing work uncovered several lives of tremendous conflict and strife between Leila and her father, as well as a life in which she had been bitterly betrayed by the man who was now her husband and had almost died as a result of it. However, when we went further back still, Leila discovered a life in which she had been a male member of a primitive warring tribe, mercilessly killing men, women and children in a frenzied attack on another tribe. One of this man’s victims had been Leila’s present husband, who, a woman in that life, had pleaded for mercy. Without registering any emotion, however, the warrior had slaughtered the whole family. Leila felt deeply shocked and humbled by this experience and it took her a couple of weeks to integrate it. As a result of it she now feels far less inclined to judge others, especially her husband and her father.”
– page 156 – 157

This interested me to hear of somebody who was supposedly a male warrior killing machine, indiscriminately murdering men, women and children alike with zero empathy, only to be a woman in this life in the future with empathy, shocked to see themselves behaving in ways they never would at this point with “who they are now.” I personally think that we’re obviously learning something from these incarnational experiences and the roles we try on, leading to different choices the next time around – greater empathy and understanding about things, and a different way to be. How else to explain that evolution. But in the end it’s still the same energy piloting the wheel, moving from body to body to body.

Then there’s the most disturbing aspect of reincarnation, at least for me anyway – the amnesia. Living out a whole life, being an entire person with loves, losses, triumphs and foibles…then forgetting nearly all of it as we incarnate again. (And I say nearly all…but there are people who forget completely all, and don’t have the faintest inkling about their past selves until they’re put under hypnosis or when doing certain breathing exercises that relax them to the point of having spontaneous flashbacks.) On a soul level we retain the lessons we learned and it seems that we’ll usually make different and better choices in our subsequent lives, hence, soul evolution, but I know I’m not alone in this “!!!!” feeling concerning the amnesia of all the other day-to-day and personality aspects of these lives. I’ve seen it mentioned on a message board forum I participate in. It freaks people out, myself included, that we completely forget who we used to be, starting over again…and again…and again. Yet this seems to clearly be what’s going on. It’s yet another topic for another write up, the why’s and how’s of the incarnational amnesia and what the metaphysical conspiracy is behind that, whether we’re continually being trapped, “amnesia-ized” and re-routed back here after death. It flies in the face of the happy version of the afterlife as found in the works of people like Sylvia Browne, but I’ve read some eye opening personal insights into it all on that aforementioned message board, people’s experiences that gave me pause and forever changed how I view what may really be happening in the afterlife. Author David Icke also speaks of the afterlife realms being just another layer of “the Matrix” in his book “Tales From the Time Loop.” Obviously the only reason we’re even able to keep incarnating into new lives is because of this amnesia – how else would you be able to have a fresh start in each life if you remembered 150 previous lives, including ones on other planets as beings other than human? Right? !! But that’s to say that continually incarnating here life after life after life is actually in our best interest. Because what if it’s not? We’re taught by many spiritual/metaphysical sources that we’re here to “learn lessons,” viewing this incarnational round and round as a flowery positive thing for our own good, but there’s the idea that we may very well be trapped here by higher negative stuff, or just accidentally stuck in some way. So if that’s the case, this amnesia is not a something beneficial, it’s just ensuring that we continue to remain trapped and asleep. It’s just one possibility.

From what I’ve gathered in my own personal experience I supposedly “came back” here on my own volition with a group of others, for a particular mission. But problems arise when we slip under the waves and forget who we are and why we came here in the first place and get lost along the way, stuck on the incarnational round and round. But I digress. ;) Yet more topics for another write up….

 
Parallel timelines. Just when you think you had yourself all figured out, parallel timelines come along to throw a wrench in the works. ;) It’s one thing to have been a different person in say, a past life, but it’s another thing entirely to wind up as two or more vastly different you’s in the current life, via multiple probable futures and parallel timelines. As I wrote on my website, for every choice you make in life there exists the choice you didn’t make, the road not taken…but you actually did, in what’s known as another timeline.

“Each and every choice creates a fork in the road, down to whether you chose to wear one shirt to work or another. Some timelines are so closely identical with such insignificant divergences that they pretty much blend together. Others are based on choices that are so vastly polarizing and far reaching that it’s a complete branching, and formulates a new version of yourself you could almost say. On some level, you wind up living out all the possible choices available to you in any given situation. […] The future with all its possibilities has already played itself out. It’s not “out there” in some far off future that hasn’t happened. It’s already happened. There is no time, and the past, present and future is happening simultaneously. If it wasn’t, then psychic people or those in a trance state wouldn’t be able to connect with people who are currently alive “in the past”, and people with intuitive abilities wouldn’t be able to glimpse future events via visions and premonition dreams. I figured this one out when I was about 17. I’d had several instances of glimpsing something before it happened, seeing it verbatim, down to the littlest detail, as if I had had peeked through a window into the future. Then the event would play itself out exactly as I’d seen. It occurred to me that in order for me to see something before it happens means…that it must have already happened. […]What if you glimpsed an upcoming event, however mundane, via a vision, then you find yourself several hours later in the middle of it and everything is going down exactly as you foresaw….can you now change and alter what you do, what you say, and how the scenario goes in general? Absolutely! Why? Because there is no one set future. There are multiple probable realities, all of which have played themselves out. When you have a premonition about a future event, you’re seeing the most likely outcome, based on if things keep going the way they’re currently going. That’s all. But it doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.”

In that write up I go on to talk about glimpsing myself in other parallel timelines as I live out that particular life. I mention one incident in particular as a good example but there are three or four others that I didn’t get into, for personal reasons. And taking the concept of parallel timelines and applying it to what I know of my various major fork-in-the-road moments in life, I’ve been able to surmise that there are timelines where I’m vastly different than the “me” that sits before my computer right now, typing this. !! I recommend everybody take a moment to ponder the various fork moments they’ve had in life and how the choices one has made have shaped where they are today. Then stop to ponder the idea of a you “over there” and how it may actually be more real than the version of you “over here”! For myself, I’ve had many MANY fork-in-the-road moments over the past 10 years alone, so there are a lot of variations and possibilities of me out there. As a result I’ve felt for awhile that this timeline isn’t right, not when I consider where I was then to where I am now. It’s a square peg pounded into a round hole, the train that was moved over 25 sets of tracks to get from where it started waaaay over there to be where it is right now…via a lot of outside manipulation. It’s felt surreal and dream-like for years, and I can feel my other selves “out there” and have even had glimpses of them on occasion. I used to mistakenly believe that what I’m doing “over here,” with my writings, research, my website, the subjects I talk about and the way I’ve been living my life in general, especially over the past seven years, was “me,” it’s “who I am.” Now I know better and realize that it’s not. It’s one possible facet outcome of “me”…that’s all. But it certainly doesn’t encompass the all of who “I” am……if there even is such a thing.

 
Multiple personality disorder (MPD) and multiple “personas.” I held off on writing this section until the very end. I wrote everything else around it, including the conclusion, before finally deciding to try to dig in. That’s because for me, this subject isn’t really that pleasant. The whole way in which MPD happens is quite negative (severe abuse/organized Satanic ritual abuse/trauma-based government mind control programming, etc.) and it’s stuff I’ve already touched on in my book. But for the sake of this piece I’ll retread a little bit.

Quoting from my book, because I’m too lazy to try to retype it all over again in paraphrased form ;) :

“Before researching heavily into the subject of mind control, I independently came up with the idea of what I call “multiple personas,” which differs from the concept of multiple personality disorder. In the case of MPD (or Disassociative Identity Disorder, DID, as it’s now called) we understand it as being a situation of the person having separate, individual fractured personalities, sometimes having their own unique names, genders, ages, personalities, speech patterns, mannerisms, etc., and accompanying black out periods when personalities are flip flopping back and forth. It’s wild stuff. And I can’t say I’ve ever known anybody personally who had this problem to that severe of an extent – although I have on the other hand, witnessed what I have deemed multiple personas. It’s a much milder form of being a full on split personality, but it’s not to be confused with being a multi-dimensional person. If you’re “real” you’re not going to be a one dimensional cardboard cut out after all. You’re going to exhibit different moods, different sides of yourself as you navigate your way through life playing your various roles. You’re a mom, a friend, a wife and lover, a neighbor, a daughter. Somebody’s dad, brother, son, boss, husband. You can’t be one way to everybody, and that’s very normal and totally understandable.

“But what I’m talking about is having an “almost” split personality. A situation where the “mood swings” are more like severe personality swings, but the person in question still answers to their name and never loses awareness of their “core” self, versus multiple personality disorder where a person may answer to a different name, thinking they are actually somebody else. My theory is that in the case of multiple personas there could be one of a couple of things happening: 1) the mind control target has had their mind split/fractured during programming sessions, which leaves them with personality instability in their waking life that in turn, can cause their personality to shift around, yet…they never quite make the full flip over into a compartmentalized “alter”, losing the sense of who they are. It stops just short of that, leaving the person a fully functioning member of society, with (relatively…) little suspicious behavior that would be noticed by anybody. Or 2) it’s a situation where programming to fracture the mind has only been done on a mild, surface level.

“I figured some this out on my own around 1999-2000 or so, after having experienced my mom’s rapid and unstable personas switches as a teen, as well as hearing my brother’s story, and then observing my then boyfriend, as well as my own self, only to stumble onto corroborating data several years later in an article by Gunther Rassbacher that backed up the tentative theory. From the online article “Operation Open Eyes: Mind Control in America – Five Easy Steps to Create a Manchurian Candidate” by Rassbacher (bolded words my own emphasis):

“The next step is Level 3 hypnosis, where the subject will become an “overwrite” upon his own personality. An “overwrite” is a new identity or personality. It is similar to having multiple personalities, except the original personality is repressed or hidden under the “overwrite” and will not surface for a set period of time which is determined by the Programmer.

The “overwrite” is not a complete new identity. There is just enough information written into the subject’s personality for us to determine his viability…”

“While I have yet to know somebody who exhibited individualized split personalities to a severe extent, I have on the other hand, witnessed the concept of multiple personas, or maybe an “overwrite,” as it’s called in the above excerpt. I have also seen these people assign an alternate moniker to themselves that they like to occasionally go by, and sometimes would use that name in lieu of their given name…but yet, while still retaining full memory and recognition of their “real self.” (have also read of a number of famous people that I suspect of being mind controlled who do this as well, admitting to their various “alter egos” who have their own names!)”

Whether it’s DID or multiple personas, they both have the same common denominator: The personality being fractured into other selves, often times of different ages, genders and personality types, which of course brings things back around to the topic of this piece – what is the real us? If a 42 year old woman has alters that include a teenage boy for instance, who talks in a way that she normally doesn’t, and behaves in a completely different manner from her normal self, then what’s the difference? Are either of them really her?

No, actually. Not in the true sense, on a soul level. That’s what my conclusion is.

*****

If you were to strip away all these influences, the “ego” as it’s known as, then what’s left? Who is the real us? We think we know who we are…but do we really?

It’s obviously not your gender, genetic race, nationality, generational label, body type, astrological sign, hair color, music/food/clothing preference, etc. and so on, as we’ve seen. Those are just outer shell characteristics influenced by DNA, family and upbringing, culture, planetary energies, and/or things we pick up along the way from one incarnation to the next. It’s not even your intellect, temperament or emotions, as these can all be altered through hormones, drugs, and the brain. This is probably old news for experienced spiritual seekers, but for many it’s revelatory. Even aware types can really get caught up in our current body shell and its various “labels” and “identities,” thinking that this is us. All because of amnesia. Amnesia not only of our past lives, but of “WHO WE ARE” and “WHERE WE COME FROM” in general.

Yet there’s obviously a “you” in there somewhere. So long as you’re conscious and sentient, feeling and thinking, there’s something generating it all. If you’ve traveled outside your body or witnessed ghosts and non-physical entities then you have your own personal proof for soul/astral energy, something that’s separate from the physical body.

My personal conclusion is that the only thing that is truly us on a soul level is what we learned from our lives. All the other traits are transient, external influences that eventually fall away and fade out. The only thing we truly take with us on a permanent level is what we learned and experienced. That’s who we are. We are the experiences and the lessons, which actually ties into stuff that was revealed to me by my higher self, which I get into in my higher self article. I tuned into my higher self one night back in early 2002 when I was living in Portland Oregon, asking it a general question about my life situation, and instead got a response, in the form of a visual that covered the entire BIGGER PICTURE gambit of life for all of us everywhere. Pinpoints of light emanating outwards from a creator source, all the lights connected up to each other with a web of strands, and ultimately connected back to the creator source point of origin. Pieces of this creator source that were sent out into reality to live and experience all aspects of things on behalf of this Source. Everybody here is connected. Everybody here is One. That was reality, I was shown. That’s what’s going on.

“!!!” I thought when I was shown this. And here I wanted to find out about some silly personal issue of the moment! :D In retrospect I think my higher self was so glad that I had picked up the figurative phone and gave it a call, the first time ever in this incarnation, maybe in any of my incarnations, who knows, that it used the opportunity to get this message to me. Kind of like “Forget whatever you’re asking about, since we only have five seconds here you need to know THIS!” Then boom, downloads this visual.

Later in Florida when I connected to my higher self again one afternoon it showed me this same vision in response to a particular question I had (see above link for the full story if you’re interested), then went on to elaborate, “This [maintaining constant awareness of being an extension of the Creator in all that we say or do] is very difficult to do in 3rd density. But it’s been done before. So it can be done.”

Admittedly, that was the first time in my life that I thought of myself as being an extension of something else – the Creator Source no less – and as such, a representation of it in everything I say and do, versus this independent body running around in the world, me me me me me! It hit me and left me a bit amazed afterwards, like, “whoa…”

My higher self was right though – it is a difficult mindset to maintain. But not impossible. I haven’t had success in doing it….then again I’ve been lazy and haven’t really tried. But it would be cool if I could. It’s easy to get wrapped up in our own sense of self, the “me me me!” cut off from the world, our own isolated little island, with the ego thinking it’s the one in charge here.

So that’s apparently what we ultimately are – individualized pieces of a connected Creator Source whole, blobs of energy pulled from this bigger source that slips into various shells in different realms, lives and learns, experiences and grows, and while there, become influenced by outside energies and forces that end up creating the illusion of “Self” and disconnectedness. And as illustrated throughout this piece, it’s amazing how strong those influences are in shaping what we think is this disconnected, individualized “us,” perpetuating a state of amnesia.

This leads one to wonder then, do souls have a temperament the way our physical bodies do? What about personal energy frequencies? In the energy state there must be a way that souls identify each other – this implies an energetic frequency or even personality stamp of the soul itself. Is this inherent, or inherited from all the different incarnations? If not, then where does it come from? And even then things don’t end with our soul – there’s the higher self connection beyond that. Multi-layers of interfacing. The etheric and astral, helping to form the soul, which is a projected fragment of the higher self, which in turn is ultimately a projected fragment of the “Creator Source,” whatever that is. !!

I’ll leave off with this weird little anecdote. Recently I was doing an Osho Zen tarot card reading, and in the card position for “What is needed for resolution [to the issue at hand]” the card that popped out of the deck at me was the one called “Conditioning.” In the book the first two lines of the card description says, “Unless you drop your personality you will not be able to find your individuality. Individuality is given by existence; personality is imposed by the society.” !!! A bit uncanny in terms of it’s accuracy. The card as a whole has to do with being a sheep, going along with the crowd, etc., with a picture depicting a lion amongst a herd of fluffy white sheep, but it does also have relevance for what’s been discussed in this piece here. Having externally imposed personality and character traits that interfere with who we really are the core level. And the need to find who we are at the core level by stripping away all that externally imposed gunk that’s been tacked on to us throughout our various incarnations. Due to writing this piece for my website I’ve been working on figuring it all out for myself, and it’s been an interesting experience. Recently at work while walking through the halls I was pondering the idea of me in some distant future incarnation, like maybe one where I’m out in space, or whatever people will be doing with themselves in the future ;) :D in a reality closer to something you’d see on “Star Trek” then the office job in this strange old 1970’s looking building I currently find myself temping at here in 2007. One where the “me” there wouldn’t understand the clothes that I wear here, and looks different, and has had a different life and upbringing. Maybe something more positive than I’ve had in this life. And yet it would still be “me.” I could feel the energy of “me” there on a soul level, underneath the outer exterior that may be very different.

I’ve tried doing this many times before, either imagining myself in my past lives or trying to project myself into the future, where I’m “me” but yet not me, because I’m in a different body in a different life, but I’ve never been able to do it. I’ve always just been so locked into this particular self identifying so strongly with this body that I can’t even see myself as being anybody else, it’s just too weird, to the point where it actually has freaked me out……….despite having what seem to be past life memories where I’ve been looking down at my past body as I was in that incarnation! Talk about conflict. But this time things were different, and I just “got it.” It just clicked. I was able to separate myself enough to stop seeing this body in these surroundings as being “ME.” Maybe it was because of the various preliminary work I’ve been doing these past couple of months, which has slowly been changing the way I think and react and view things, who knows. But it was VERY cool to experience that, and it feels like it loosened things up, maybe a slight movement of the assemblage point. The Osho Zen card was right – this strong self-identification with this incarnation’s body and its acquired personality is/was a major obstacle that needs to be overcome in order to make any further progress. And probably for anybody who’s stuck like that. And once you’ve had a slight slip in perspective like that and loosened things up enough to be able to rise up enough to see a broader view, there’s no going back.