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In ancient times, personality theory was deeply tied up with spiritual beliefs, (see our Divination page on the ancient Oracles Divination the Gods made men do things, or it was the devil who tempted Adam and Eve. In the Greek or Hebrew tradition, It was presumed that humans have free will to do as they please. We would argue that if you are committed to a religious cause, you have no free will. You do as God wishes or the opposite. No enlightened actions are possible. You can have no self knowledge or the humility to accept advice from other people. As Marx who is not very fashionable following the collapse of communism wisely said "religion is the opium of the people". An addiction prohibiting free will. In the Christian tradition, religion taught that people should accept their lot in life, a belief which has stifled political change by acceptance of the status quo. A quick analysis of the personality of the GOD some people believe in, is a big concern for any humanitarians with empathy for other creatures.
A personality overview of the Old Testament God. (have a lie down here god and tell me about those naughty children of yours) of the Old testament reveals some pretty bizarre sado-masochistic fetishes, brutal physical assault, a paranoid schizophrenic delusion of grandeur; that other gods were also being worshiped, an obsessive compulsive disorder, megalomania, a bi-polar disorder when he is angry and despondent and everything else in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of psychological classification.
Such a nasty pathological godwould be locked up in any modern society but many people still pray to Yaweah, Jehovah, or whatever name anyone uses to comfort themselves in the use of unreasonable force over others; in the name of such a God, anything can be justified. "God told us to invade your land". Oh! well, thats OK then, if your God told you to do it, murder steal and plunder away! The building of a wall is nothing, as one Melbournian put it to me, "We have been persecuted for centuries, next time we will get the first shot in" He went on to say the Merchant of Venice should have been free to extract his pound of flesh. A therapist would be obliged to notify the police after this man's God left (try to avoid the immediate wrath factor) and have him arrested for murder, robbery, assault and battery, a hamburger of charges with the lot, sentence eternity, no parole.
It is almost impossible to speak of personality without first disposing of god. If you think you are made in his image, vanity and conceit will rule your personality. What has Israel done to it's Heretics, like the courageous Mordechai Vanunu converted from being Jewish to Christianity when in Australia. This could be considered an improvement. Certainly, Jesus is less sadistic and brutal than the Hebrew god. Mordechai Vanunu was released on the 24th April 2004 from Ashkelon prison. Seven years in solitary confinement, what a nightmare Orwellian government trying to break his spirit by isolation for revealing to the world Israel's secret nuclear weapons. How Mordechai survived mentally We hope you get back to ringing those bells very soon Mordechai, they need to be loud to wake such ignorance. Mordechai was re-arrested on 11th November by nasty Israel even though the information he has is decades old, the Jews want to torture him a bit more. FREE MORDECHAI.
The rest of the coalition of the stupid rally to invade a country with suspected weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, but when an Israeli shows that they do have such weapons that they have been lying about to receive US funding, they lock him up. Has Cindy the Mossad agent retained her faith? Some irony that American chemical companies are being sued by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange. The Delilah femme fatal who deceived Mordechai and now lives in America, but still has property and ties in Israel. She refuses to speak to anyone about what she did. It seems that she cannot live easily with what she has done and might be repressing it, or in denial for the rest of her days. Cheers Mordechai, in Israel they may think you are a traitor; but to many world citizens, you are an inspirational hero. When you came out after so many years holding your fists high, we thought fantastic they didn't break him down. Shame on you Israel. I know many of you do not agree with your governments stand on the west bank but this belief comes from your god's promise, a complete fiction along with GOD, made up to justify indefensible murder and theft. No wonder you have such problems with your neighbours, they have to defend themselves from you and your belligerent GOD. What has personality got to do with it? god told me to take your land, what rubbish Israel. Shame on us as well, being part of coalition of the stupid and letting you get away with the god ignorance for so long.
Does Israel have any free will, but to act as a fundamentalist religious state, considering the personality of the god they follow? We should be sending masses of bombers over Israel and Arab states dropping leaflets on evolution and Darwin, introducing them to Neanderthals who had similar beliefs in natural phenomena they could not fathom. The only way out of their conflict is knowledge, but Americans are so often fundamentalist bible bashers, what hope do we have, they also have little free will, but at least their society can tolerate more diversity of opinion than might exist in some religious states, perhaps Tibet being an exception before Chinese occupation.
If American troops were more educated in Roman history, or even recent british colonial expansion days they would realise that to make the peace with the vanquished enemy, they did it with engineering road works and flowers, sending the nations elite to initiation in the Elysian mysteries, to Oxford or Cambridge, Ivy League Yankee Universities. Instead they humiliate and degrade their captives. Shame America. Flowers and engineering please, with lots of public education on evolution. Almost too late now, your own soldiers ignorance has hardened the populations attitude to you. They needed your help, not a whip. You could have sent 20 specialists in to deal with one man and saved the rest of the population. In retaliation for the injury and murder of your citizens, try and have pity on the ignorance that does such acts under the name of any god and get those bible bashers out of political decision making, spend on education. GOD the Scopes trial, I forgot how fundamentally America at large is still so ego-centrically naval gazing, they banned the teaching of evolution in some states until the mid 1960s. The Scopes Trail. Primitive Neanderthals, like Narcissus looking at their own handsome reflection in GOD's image, they cannot stomach evolution. We hope the next generation are better prepared for a world of religious bigotry.
The idea of a jihad, a holy war is not part of the true spirituality of the Islamic religion. A jihad in the spiritual sense means an effort or struggle for self knowledge.
Likewise the Christians nations were prepared to lie to anyone about Weapons of Mass destruction to try and justify murder, the repugnant dark ages Christian concept of a holy Christian war. An Islamic Jihad or the idea of a "just war", is just as revolting and primitive as the Hebrew god. If both groups were educated about science and evolution they would realise they have a lot in common, the could both abandon faith and beliefs and the god superstition and then it would be possible to be friends. This god fiction is obsolete for any real world applications.
The Koran or Bible cannot answer practical question like. How old is the earth? So you use modern technology, electricity and computers and have learnt zero about DNA and evolution, the greatest intellectual achievement in the past two thousand years which can free you of ignorance and they cling to god like insecure children. You get the enemy; your narcissus that you demand with your level of ignorance. Why does the Christian world generally support the god of Israel?
Some Sufi schools teach exercises including meditation and breathing to help discover the inner-self, the "being" Gurdjieff called it. One favourite exercise used by Gurdjieff was the STOP exercise. You can use it on your children or friends and empower them to do it to you. Make an agreement with someone you trust that when they say "STOP", you will obey exactly and freeze still in any posture and consider, What are you feeling now, your posture and breathing it is anything unusual, your thoughts, what are you thinking, feeling or sensing, the moment you are stopped. What impression could your non-verbal body language be having on others?
In Victoria Australia, the state labor government has introduced repressive laws against free speech to jail anyone for six months for vilifying a race or religion. The religious vilification laws against free speech. In Victoria Australia to criticise a religion can mena you could be jailed for six months for to vilifing the holders of that belief, criticism of the Islamic religion has been held to be vilification of Muslims, but criticism of Christ is not vilification of Christians!
America vetoes anti-Jewish media reports and the occupation of the West bank. Israel shoots civilians and then investigate it themselves and find it was OK, so what, their GOD said to just "do it" because he said so. Deliberate collective violence against impoverished civilians. Will Israel ever really exit the Gaza strip? Come on yanky septic tanks, do what is right and teach your population a little evolution please. like John Cleese playing Basil Faulty in Faulty Towers "Don't mention the crusades". Regulate that TV and radio stations broadcast equal time for science education as they do for religious instruction. I know many Israeli and Arabs citizens of sound mind, who ask themselves the same question, why America does not moderate Israeli aggression; maybe, if you were more collectively mentally aware of evolution and able to rise above religious bias yourself!
If your government is based on a religious ideology, you have a dictator in charge who is beyond question or moral responsibility. With the GOD they have, Israel acts in ignorance of thousands of years of human learning, no free will at all, to act contrary to the ignorant belligerent way they seek more land. The Arabs are just as committed to their downfall. Neither of you have a single fact between you, no knowledge on which to base informed action.
Evolution will show you a family tree not so glorious, back to the most basic animal that can defecate out a different orifice from that which it eats with. The Acorn worm which at least has a mouth and an anus, a distant relative, large chunks of common DNA, no God is sight.
We can all take personal responsibility for our actions, but only if we do not abrogate that responsibility to an external locus of control outside ourselves. Neanderthal man was around 40,000 years ago and appeals to antiquity are appeals to remain ignorant. Neanderthal man used tools made fire and was better than any other animal at survival than homo Sapiens. We may have sent them extinct, like the wooly Mammoth, Neanderthal may have had similar beliefs to modern patrons of stupid religions, in a god or GODs affecting environmental events they could not understand. Homo Sapiens today have much better knowledge of the world we live in and GOD told us nothing, we learnt it ourselves, if you care to use it and take responsibility for your own actions. We are all part of the monkey family, no-one has an exemption certificate from any god to say they alone can do as they please.
The Greeks wrote of many Gods who were related to humans (not a single god with many names like the Hebrew one) who could intervene in the affairs of humans with their own lust or influence humans, make them fall in love or wage war, and they could even be insecure and jealous of men, for example Athena turning Arachnid into a spider for daring to challenge her in a weaving contest. At least the Greek Gods of Olympus had human like personalities, there was no ultimate authority although Zeus was the head of the GODS he never got his own way completely.
They are less authoritative and prescriptive in behaviour, with imperfections, not omnipotent GODS as the Hebrew God claimed to be. The Gods of Olympus could lust, be jealous, in a rage, in love or seek vengeance on men or each other, like Odyesseus was persecuted by Poseidon and took ten years to get home from the Trojan war after he angered Poseidon by blinding his son, the cyclops, Polyphemis. That is a another great story.
Not accepting that their rulers were Gods or that there was a supreme moral authority. The Greeks rejected monarchies and opted for republican city states. The rejection of an ultimate GOD made way for philosophers like Thales of Miletus and students that followed him invented philosophy with an emphasis on finding natural causes and explanations for things rather than saying everything was the whim of some GOD. A student of Thales, Anaximander originated the belief that matter was composed of opposites and different amounts of air, fire, earth and water.
They had different visions of God in the Greeks case multiple Gods, but both the Hebrew and Greeks believed in predictions about the future. That we all had a destiny that the God/Gods would know about, could influence and that we could ask the Oracles for their knowledge from the underworld and change our fate. Oedipus seemed to have no choice but to carry out the oracle's prediction. Prediction for Oedipus
Madness changes depending on the social/political context, A sadistic butcher might rise far with the right environment like a Hitler or Pol Pot. The diagnostic and Statistics Manual of the American Psychiatric Society DSMIV. A very clinical definition that does not say what being sane means. The point is, that personality is that viewed by the significant other. The social context defines the personality, how the self interacts with others. One persons madness is another's sanity, it depends on the context.
It was very easy for the ancient Greeks, there were only had a few basic types of personality, phlegmatic and sanguine related to balance of the four elements of earth, fire, air and water. The founders of modern medicine, doctors still take the Hippocratic oath and follow some ancient traditions of medicine.
Rene Descarte Latin. Cogito Ergo sum I think therefore I am Descarte's maxim proving self existence Descarte was convinced that the soul of a person was located in the pineal gland in the brain.
We are a mixture of genetic predispositions hanging around reacting to environmental events, what free will can we have, acting as automatons. Many characteristics have a genetic component, Huntington's Cholera, Schizophrenia a more complex relationship with genes. A study of your environmental influences and a family history should give you more information for self observation on what choice you have to act any differently than you do.
Are we internally driven to do things, to achieve, or are we encouraged and persuaded by significant others in our life? To believe in faith and GOD with no evidence is an abrogation of personal responsibility, an acceptance of an external locus of control devoid of individual reasoning or moral responsibility. Real personality to be differentiated from others, not "one of the chosen flock" requires something extra, internal will, not just a passive acceptance or acquiesence to an external religious recipe for behaviour or morality. Having an external locus of control is fine for a while and if the significant other giving guidance is benevolent, but it inevitably leads to dependence. Having an internal locus of control, means knowing yourself, making your own informed choices and never abrogating that responsibility for your own action to any religious beliefs. Religion has and does tell people to do anything, it is harder for individuals to resist an attractive GOD with rewards like eternal life no matter how brutal they are. If you are doing as some GOD said, you are not being the best self you can be.
While some psychological disorders have a genetic component, it is only the influences of the environment that can trigger the predisposition. For example in identical twins the incidence of schizophrenia is 50%, implying a genetic factor that appears to defy simple genetic causes.
Phrenology Reading personality from bumps on the head. They were correct about one thing, there are discrete areas of the brain optimised for different physical and mental tasks, such as the frontal lobe being more verb orientated and nouns being further back towards the temporal lobe. The real localization of function is fluid and neurons can change their links. The neural biology underlying the skull though, has no relationship with external skeletal shape. This view survives today in stereotyped beliefs, e.g. that attractive people are often assessed as also being more intelligent. Personality characteristics localized by phrenology have nothing to do with the actual neural speciality for that area.
The frontal areas identified by Phrenology were approximately from the forehead down XIII-benevolence, XXX-comparison, XXIV-space, XIX-individuality, X-self love.
In Victorian times, reading a person's personality by phrenology was thought to be scientific, it is not and never was a just form of personality assessment. It is valid to infer personality from behaviour, but not on looks and skull shape alone. Such a physically based deterministic philosophy of human nature seems is at odds with the concept of free will and a possibility of change for the better, where the environment and nurture could change genetic traits or predispositions. According to this view, brutes would always be brutes and never able to change, because of the bumps on their head, they had no free will to act otherwise, just as the aristocracy had no choice but to be gentlemen born to rule.
The current neurological explanation for personality is that each individual is uniquely wired neurally. Neurons in the brain often do not link directly, but via a convergence zone, a third party in the neural network. For example a complete experience might be composed of sight, sound, smell, taste and feeling; most of the anatomically distinct regions that deal with different senses are located away from each other and a complete experience is assembled in areas indirectly connected to the areas of the brain processing the information.
There is no duality of mind and body as in Rene Descarte's philosophy. The mind is defined by its physical space and interconnection of its neurons with neuro- chemical transmitters .Studies of the victims of brain damage reveals that there are specific areas for movement, hearing, and vision as well as basic differences between the two sides of the brain. The front part of the brain is most recently evolved and is involved in forming plans and intentions.
As Oliver Sack points out, ' self is a very deep neurological construct of unique neural circuitry, there can be no self without a body.' Parkinson's disease can affect the timing of movements but music can compensate, he quotes the example of Terry Thomas who in later life could not walk but could dance across the room to music. See also Oliver Sack's account of people in a trance like state since an epidemic in 1917 of Encephalitis lethargica who were woken up by Dopamine, a chemical transmitter to provide an electrical bridge between the ends of neurons. Over 50 chemical neurotransmitters are known which contribute to healthy mental functioning.
Statistically reliable personality testing began with the development of scientific method and means to analyse non-linear categorical data. Just as the average height in a population can be calculated, so can other more intangible but stable personality characteristics. Abuses of personality testing in the workplace.
Normal daily functioning requires a level of arousal. Body temperature can affect our level of alertness. Our body temperature decreases when we are tired and is at its peak in the morning when we wake up. There are early birds and night owls.
Under certain circumstances, being stressed could save our lives. A physiological reaction to danger can increase our production of adrenal hormones and blood sugar levels. Stress prepares us for fight or flight reactions,dominance or submission. Stereotypes of behaviour. AGGRESSION sex differences
In normal daily circumstances being stressed places us in a situation where we have excess energy that cannot be spent in a socially acceptable way. The perception of danger can drive the body to react. The key point is that the mind drives the physical reaction, observation and control over negative thoughts can stop the physical reaction.
Easy, just observe negative thoughts and re-evaluate the situation. Unfortunately, we cannot see our own flaws, just as a writer cannot edit their own work. It all looks rosy to me, the same logical ineptitude, grammar and syntax errors I have always make still look great to me, WOW,!! can I wright really good.
Each person needs help and we need to accept it graciously when colleagues or editors tell us that they had observed something about our work that bothers or worries them.
(Crocodile Dundee reference: Americans are stereotyped as having Analysts, Australian's have shallow beer guzzling mates. Honesty and openness with others.
Schedule of recent experiences birth death and the in-between Positive reinforcement from good life events? Latest research?
Observing Stress NEEDS SIGNIFICANT OTHERS
Sufi STOP exercise self-observation categories
It is though that there are two types of stress. the first is a stable level of stress which does not change very much. The second is called situational or performance anxiety stress which is related to the environmental challenges, for example some people might find public speaking to be very stressful.
Australian Council of Education Research Burnout Parental and Occup Tests
ACER testing.
Edward Debono
DeBono lateral thinking.
