WHO ARE YOU?
In childhood we can be anything, and then around our Saturn Return at age 29 the reality of our disposition kicks in and we recognise ourselves to be the result of feedback loops of experience that accumulate as a consequence of interactions with the solid world surrounding us.
Basic life forms like bacteria don’t understand who they are; they are just chains of nucleotides made
from Nitrogen, Phosphate and the sugars that form RNA molecules. Bacteria have no eyes, they have no cognitive library and their structure
has been the same for billions of years.
By comparison we humans have a huge sensory system and a vast storage capacity whose
only limitation is the extent of our brain’s imaginings and our ability to test our imaginings in the 'reality' of a physical world.
Each of us are born with unique genetic make-ups from which we express ourselves in daily thoughts and feelings - sometimes
acting, sometimes reflecting, while in between the moments drift in the meandering currents of situation. All is perspective
and the art is to find a rock of self from which to view the panorama.
How much is you?
How much do you know?
A mass of parts in confusion,
Beating their own little paths,
Unaware of illusion.
When our individual perception of human relatedness radically differs from group values and societal norms, we can be categorised
as having a personality disorder. Distinct from transitory lapses of logic, personality disorders create conditions that muddle cognitive
processes. They tend to start in the formative years and may eventually turn into lifelong traits; or they can be initiated and influenced
by seminal moments of triumph or crisis.
There is currently no consensus about what constitutes a personality disorder as distinct
from a mental illness, although the latter is often used when a medical ‘cure’ appears.
Most of us experience cognitive
muddles at some stage of life’s journey and the key to disentangling them is to get the best understanding of who we basically are
- this can be done through a variety of means.
The Briggs/Myer personality questionnaire (adapted from Carl Jung’s theories) was designed to indicate how people perceive the world
and how they make decisions as a result of their psychological preferences.
Briggs/Myer uses four dichotomies: extroversion/introversion;
sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, judging/perception, which slot you into one of sixteen boxes and indicate the strengths and weaknesses
of your inherited disposition.
Close friends are those with whom we share common interests and personal values. The normality of our ‘group’ being a majority consensus that aligns with our group’s culture.
There are many personality tests such as Psychology Today’s - Big Five Personality Test, that you can choose from if you want to know
yourself better.
There are many online IQ tests if you’re interested - but does a high IQ facilitate friendship and the association of normality?
Psychologists divide intelligence into five categories: social intelligence; athletic intelligence; linguistic intelligence; logical intelligence; spatial intelligence. We all have these to varying degrees and we adapt them to the acceptable norms of our particular culture.
The distinction between a mental disorder and brain function is unclear as exampled by the 44 year old French man who had 90% of his
brain missing, had an IQ of 84 and managed to live a 'normal life'.
There are over 200 classified forms of mental disorder and one in five Americans will have one of these in any given year with the
onset being related to things such as: stress, bereavement, relationship breakdown, physical and sexual abuse, unemployment, social
isolation or physical disability.
Some of the major types of mental disorder are: depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, obsessive/compulsive
disorders - and even being overly nice can be categorized as being a disorder as in the case of empaths.
Mental disorders do not involve physical brain damage or intellectual disability; disorders are a state of ill direction contrary
to the individual’s makeup; and these condensate out of our ephemeral understanding of life’s journey.
In his book The Age of Insight (2012), Neuroscientist Eric Kandel expressed the Freudian view that ‘most of our mental life, including
most of our emotional life, is unconscious at any given moment …and that normal mental life and mental illness form a continuum’.
In modern times the connection between ourselves and the world has given way to physical interventions that have an indirect effect
on the mind such as Prozac, exercise, meditation, diet, etc, while the experience of our thoughts has been relegated to a safe place
behind a wall of culturally correct behaviour.
Modern Psychology was founded by German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt in 1879 and shortly after Sigmund Freud developed his method of
psychoanalysis which proposed that the causative factors for personality disorders develop from unresolved traumatic childhood experiences.
Carl
Jung developed analytical psychology which moved away from Freud’s psychosexual origins of neuroses in childhood, to an understanding
of a person’s current difficulties as given by markers projected from the subconscious in patterns of archetypal behaviour.
Jung’s study of archetypal behaviour introduced him to astrology, which he used as an adjunct to his ‘analytical’ approach. Jung’s
theory of four personality types originated from his knowledge of astrology and was later used in the Briggs/Myer personality questionnaire.
Jung’s theory of Synchronicity was developed in collaboration with his client, the famous quantum physicist, Wolfgang Pauli,
and is similar to quantum entanglement in that it incorporates similar experiences occurring at the same time to people at different
locations without a common means of causation.
This is the same association that astrologers use between planets and human behaviour, with the planets being the acausal indicators.
Astrology is still widely accepted in countries like India where religion’s influence is dominant over the political, but in the Western
world, where religious beliefs have given way to personal beliefs, astrology is seen as a threat to free will.
Recent studies have validated astrological descriptors in regard to the Eysenck Personality Inventory and there is a growing body of evidence that supports the validity of astrology.
When interpreting a birth chart I need absolute focus to be able to tune into the harmonics of a chart - which is the sum total of the wave patterns emanating from celestial bodies at the time of the individual's birth.
The great problem with verifying matters pertaining to the wave motion of macro entities is the 'observer affect' as experienced in the famous double slit experiment of quantum physics. All parapsychological phenomenon are subject to the observer effect. Not everyone can be an astrologer, even though the principles of astrology can be taught as a science, the melding of the complexities of a birth chart is an art like painting - and not everyone can paint.
Note: In 1924 Louis de Broglie proposed that particles of matter have a dual nature and in some situations act like waves. In 1925 Erwin Schrödinger described the behaviour of such a system by a wave equation that is now known as the Schrödinger equation - for which Schrödinger was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.
