Personality is a simple word which belies the complexity of what gives rise to it. It describes what we experience of a person. This experience of a personality stands as evidence of a body of memories and emotional biases contributing behavior within the moment, and comparable to trends in the person's behavior. Now consider telepathy.
People who speak of telepathy often speak of rapport. In bulk, it becomes more complex. I have become aware of many millions of people, aware of myself. Communication among so many becomes difficult to parse, especially in recognizing ulterior motives to communication. People shelter their messaging in awareness of unwanted recipients. My practice has always been to respond to aggregates of opinion, aggregates of emotion, aggregates of viewpoint; much as a stage-performer responds to and channels the mind of an audience. Rapport is difficult to achieve in this circumstance. At this point it serves the narrative to engage in some disambiguation of terms.
Two years ago I began with a notion of "Spiritual-Congruence." I proposed that people become able to achieve rapport based on a relative similarity in beliefs, values and ethics, as well as other ephemeral qualities of personality. Now I am more inclined to believe that those who accept telepathic awareness of each other grow into a body of belief and rhythm of life which simply reflects the ordinary bonds of friendship. I experienced the degree in which the intentions of one could invoke the behavior of another, and needed to examine the distinctions among considerations of individuality, friendship bonds, and the discomfiting notion of a "composite-soul." Discussions I have had among those I've been best connected with have allowed us to share a comfort-level with varying experiences of each of these within telepathic experience.
The aggregate of people's telepathic awareness of each other can be variously described as a tapestry of consciousness or spirit, or a practice of awarenessing; and it has been described as all of them by other authors. Here, I'm rattling-off some personally convenient descriptions of each for the purposes of this narrative. I describe a socialization of telepathic awareness as a tapestry in order to call attention to the extent of influence one or a group of personalities may have upon the rest; propagating and reflecting waves of emotion and discussion as a result of an event of communication, as a pebble dropped in a still pond. I consider consciousness as a relatively atheistic description of a mind, nearly divorced of spiritual or religious belief, or even physicality. I consider spirit to contain consciousness, while perhaps also accepting any influence of spiritual, religious and moral belief from any source. Awarenessing stands as a verb which describes an act of making another aware of a statement of oneself. All of the constructions of "aware" as a root-word become useful in discussion, but we can abandon any need to prefer one term over another in general.
After drowning all of telepathy in the cold intellectualism of these descriptions, I can come up for air in describing why I went to the trouble. Telepathy is an attractive super-power to a casual reader of comic books, but it is frightening as soon as we discover ourselves facing our superstitions, and our fear of standing naked before each other. It is frightening when we answer a psychiatrist who asks if we hear voices, feel insubstantial sensations, see things which are not there, or exhibit personalities and behaviors which are not our own. Here we risk becoming shackled with the superstitions of psychiatry itself, which does us all a disservice in it's responses; assuming an imbalance in brain-chemistry in order to justify a tangible therapy, while ignoring the nuances of an experience which only conveniently resembles the indications in their literature. We may resolutely refuse to accept all of the diagnoses of psychosis, schizophrenia, multiple-personality; and all of the popular condemnation of misunderstood diagnoses in the popular press. We can refuse to condemn ourselves as dissociative lunatics, because we are not.
Now I can come up for air even further in returning to what I began with: Personality. Personality is, in a sense, the basic unit which we may aggregate in experiencing the behavior of the tapestry; whatever sort of tapestry we choose to idealize. My personality is my personality, as your personality is yours. This distinction is not at all trivial. My idealism is my idealism and my idealization of myself is my idealization of myself, as yours is yours. This distinction stands as the heart of the failure of all of religion, because so many exist and because the divergence of opinion among them is protected so passionately that it frequently results in conflict and war. Standing within my idealization of self, I allow myself certain behaviors and beliefs and refuse others; and I am resolute in my choices. If a telepathic influence might seek to lead me into behaviors or beliefs outside the constraints of my idealization of myself, that influence will fail because of my force of will. I will do what I obligate myself to do, and I will not do what I obligate myself not to do. The resolve I carry within my idealization of self prevents me from becoming what I refuse to become, and I have no fear of it.
Meanwhile, I am a performing artist, so I have a more flexible experience and range within my personality. I am able to capitalize on this, in becoming able to represent other personalities within a sensitivity to their emotion and viewpoint. I am able to have a more flexible idealization of self. The effect is that I have described the necessity of a resolute defense of a range of variation in my idealization of self, while also accepting the extent to which it may expand at any given time. Returning to the swordsman's metaphor of the "Master's Circle," I begin with mastery of the basis of my own personality; and then allow myself to expand boundaries of expression and ability, within a growth in awareness of other personalities with a different range of expression and abilities.
This fundamental change in an experience of personality within a tapestry of "personalities," points to both dangers and opportunities within the growth of the experience of telepathy. For all the difficulties in describing it intellectually, I have observed that children become comfortable with it as easily as breathing, walking and talking. I always imagined that they would.
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