Magic 501: Personality and Nature
We talk, in my house, of personality as a tool and a straight jacket—a way to control the world and a way you are controlled. Whatever you say you are, whatever characteristics you view as the stable description of yourself, you will be compelled to uphold and will use to control others. An angry person is a person warning the world not to upset them, a person who is compelled to demonstrate their anger. An introvert is a person warning the world to keep a certain distance, and a person who will run away from others, because as an introvert, of course they don’t enjoy too much social contact.
The point is not that someone will not have characteristics that can describe them well enough, the point is that people often feel compelled to uphold those characteristics, and will demand others also uphold those characteristics, changing their behavior to accommodate.
Describing someone ‘well enough’ is not so much a stable prediction of who they are as a reminder that they can be different than your description, which differs from personality. Personality seeks to predict (and control.) You can describe someone as being angry, and as long as it is understood that description is always temporary.
You cannot, however, remember all these things are temporary—staying out of the trap of thinking the person is a stable, singular construction—without healing and elevation work. Without that work, it is easy to default to thinking people are simple, stable, and unchanging.
Part of the work of healing and elevation which involves recognizing yourself as a wholeness involves recognizing your own fluidity. This is not something you memorize, nor something you need to remind yourself of. Rather, it is a fundamental recognition of the fact that change is inherent, time is always a factor, and the scale of change can be anything from a day or less to lives. It is the knowledge, having seen it for yourself, that change is the tide that carries you toward divinity, life after life.
After enough healing and elevation, you don’t need to remember it. You look and see change at work in everything, and later you are able to see what kind of change and how to intervene.
Magically, the delusion of personality is very useful. It is the equivalent of a handle, an easy place to grip for manipulation. In previous entries in this series, I mentioned that a variety of negative spiritual entities find personality a particularly useful quality for enlisting people in delusion, in cycles of thought and behavior, and in a variety of destructive patterns. A priest or spiritual worker who has passed the various tests necessary to recognize change in everything is typically in a position to know how to use someone’s delusions of personality as a way to manipulate, to whatever purpose they please.
The nature of someone, however, is a bit different. It is a truism that the nature of every damn thing is change: whatever else can be said of any particular entity, change will be a part of an accurate description.
The nature of someone is what emerges from healing and elevation work, which functions to clear the various impediments to expression and more importantly the relationship the spirit has to the consciousness, where the impediments of that incarnation gather. The assertions others have made, the things we make ourselves be, the delusion of stability: all these things are gently but firmly swept away in the process, and what is left is more fundamentally the nature of the person. To be more accurate, the nature of the spirit of the person, as it currently is.
As a priest, I find the fact that the lwa have individual natures, in addition to the various fluid adaptations they make based on horse and situation, fascinating. I also find the unfolding of my own nature fascinating. We do not understand ourselves as we are, we understand what we have learned of ourselves—both from the world around us but also from the process of healing and elevating. The lwa respond to this, unfolding their natures to us in the ways we understand until, late in the process of lives, healing, and elevation, they are more or less themselves.
As mysteries, they are never fully known to us. But as spirits, neither are we known to each other. The divine owns that particular privilege itself.
The process of watching someone’s nature emerge is one of the great joys of being a priest or spiritual worker.
